Analysis of Minutiae Quality for Improved Workload Reduction in Fingerprint Identification

The workload of biometric identification in large fingerprint databases poses a challenging problem. Efficient schemes for biometric workload reduction are a topic of ongoing research. Some of the state-of-the-art approaches rely on triangles of minutia points generated by Delaunay triangulation, which are then used for indexing. In this paper, we investigate how quality estimation at the minutia level can improve the performance of such algorithms and hence the system workload. In order to reduce the number of spurious and missing minutiae, we analyse the impact of selecting minutiae points based on their qualities. This, in turn, can significantly distort the triangulation. In addition, we consider the usefulness of the average minutia quality as an additional criteria of the minutia triangles for indexing. Our results show that both strategies lead to a significant reduction in biometric workload compared to a baseline solution (i.e. exhaustive search) – down to 36% on average.