An ensemble of fingerprint matching algorithms based on cylinder codes and mtriplets for latent fingerprint identification

Abstract

Automatic latent fingerprint identification is beneficial during forensic investigations. Usually, latent fingerprint identification algorithms are used to find a subset of similar fingerprints from those previously captured on databases, which are finally examined by latent examiners. Yet, the identification rate achieved by latent fingerprint identification algorithms is far from those obtained by latent examiners. One approach for improving identification rates is the fusion of the match scores computed with fingerprint matching algorithms using a supervised classification algorithm. This approach fuses the results provided by different lower-level algorithms to improve them. Thus, we propose a fusion of fingerprint matching algorithms using a supervised classifier. Our proposal starts with two different local matching algorithms. We substitute their global matching algorithms with another independent of the local matching, creating two lower-level algorithms for fingerprint matching. Then, we combine the output of these lower-level algorithms using a supervised classifier. Our proposal achieves higher identification rates than each lower-level algorithm and their fusion using traditional approaches for most of the rank values and reference databases. Moreover, our fusion algorithm reaches a Rank-1 identification rate of $$74.03\%$$ and $$71.32\%$$ matching the 258 samples in the NIST SD27 database against 29,257 and 100,000 references, the two largest reference databases employed in our experiments.