Efficient and Accurate 3D Finger Knuckle Matching Using Surface Key Points

Contactless 3D finger knuckle is a new biometric identifier which can offer an accurate, efficient and convenient alternative for the personal identification. The current 3D finger knuckle recognition methods are limited by computationally complex or inefficient matching algorithms, which attempt to compute the matching scores from all possible translational and rotational parameters for matching a pair of templates. The strength of such approach lies in its simplicity and reliability for accurately matching intra-class samples, but expensive computational time is required. Furthermore, attempting on excessive numbers of translational and rotational parameters can also degrade the overall recognition accuracy because the imposter matches can be increased. In fact, this conventional matching approach is commonly adopted in many biometric studies, but its drawbacks have not received adequate attention. This article addresses such 3D finger knuckle recognition problem by developing a more efficient matching approach using surface key points extracted from 3D finger knuckle surfaces. Our comparative experimental results with the state-of-the art method on a publicly available 3D finger knuckle database indicates that our approach can offer over 23 times faster with performance improvement on the accuracy. Although the focus of our work is on 3D finger knuckle recognition, we also present the performance of our method on other publicly available databases with similar 3D biometric patterns including 3D palmprint and 3D fingerprint, to validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.