Cross-Sensor Fingerprint Matching Method Based on Orientation, Gradient, and Gabor-HoG Descriptors With Score Level Fusion

The fingerprint is one of the oldest and most widely used biometric modality for person identification. Existing automatic fingerprint matching systems perform well when the same sensor is used for both enrollment and verification (regular matching). However, their performance significantly deteriorates when different sensors are used (cross-matching, fingerprint sensor interoperability problem). We propose an automatic fingerprint verification method to solve this problem. It was observed that the discriminative characteristics among fingerprints captured with sensors of different technology and interaction types are ridge orientations, minutiae, and local multi-scale ridge structures around minutiae. To encode this information, we propose two minutiae-based descriptors: histograms of gradients obtained using a bank of Gabor filters and binary gradient pattern descriptors, which encode multi-scale local ridge patterns around minutiae. In addition, an orientation descriptor is proposed, which compensates for the spurious and missing minutiae problem. The scores from the three descriptors are fused using a weighted sum rule, which scales each score according to its verification performance. Extensive experiments were conducted using two public domain benchmark databases (FingerPass and Multi-Sensor Optical and Latent Fingerprint) to show the effectiveness of the proposed system. The results showed that the proposed system significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods based on minutia cylinder-code (MCC), MCC with scale, VeriFinger—a commercial SDK, and a thin-plate spline model.