Extension and Further Evaluation of the PLUS Multi-Sensor and Longitudinal Fingerprint Dataset

Inter-session or template aging related effects in fingerprint biometrics have been discussed controversially in the last decade. The lack of publicly available fingerprint databases covering longer inter-session time intervals (months to years) is the major problem limiting further research. In a previous work the PLUS MSL FP dataset was introduced, containing 106,712 fingerprint samples collected from 50 subjects in 4 sessions over a time span of two years, involving 10 different different capturing devices (optical, capacitive, thermal and multispectral ones). This work extends the PLUS MSL FP dataset by an additional, 5th session, captured 3 years after the 4th one. The additional session is evaluated regarding its fingerprint image quality (NFIQ 2.2) as well as its recognition performance (employing minutiae based fingerprint recognition schemes). The results confirm the previous findings: a trend towards lower inter-session performance compared to the intra-session one, most likely due to changes in subjects' behavior across different sessions. An additional evaluation on a small short-term inter-session fingerprint dataset revealed that this trend is not there for subjects used to handling fingerprint capturing devices.