A Survey on 2D and 3D Contactless Fingerprint Biometrics: A Taxonomy, Review, and Future Directions

Contactless fingerprint biometrics has achieved rapid development in the past decades thanks to its inherent advantages, such as no physical contact between a finger and a sensor, no contamination by latent fingerprints, and more hygienic. These advantages have paved the way for new 2D or 3D contactless fingerprint-based applications and have promoted a larger number of academic publications in recent years. Therefore, it is necessary and important to conduct a comprehensive survey on contactless fingerprint biometric technology, review the latest research findings on 2D and 3D contactless fingerprint recognition systems, and point out the future development direction of contactless fingerprint biometrics. In this work, a comprehensive survey is presented to review the 2D and 3D contactless fingerprint biometrics from four essential aspects: contactless fingerprint capture, fingerprint preprocessing, feature extraction, and template comparison. To serve as a good reference, we provide a well-structured taxonomy about contactless fingerprint biometrics. We also identify related research problems and future research directions.