Constrained nonlinear models of fingerprint orientations with prediction

Abstract

In this paper, we developed an algorithm to model the fingerprint orientation field. The algorithm comprises two steps, orientation prediction and model computation. Orientation prediction is based on piece-wise first-order phase portrait model. It is used to estimate the orientation in areas where there is no ridge information in the input image or the coherence of the orientation field is low. In the model computation, a constrained nonlinear phase portrait algorithm is proposed, which aims to get an accurate mathematical model of the fingerprint orientation field. Compared to the prior works, this algorithm is able to predict orientation even in noisy regions and it integrates the global and local orientation description into a unified mathematical form. Experiments conducted on the first 500 images of the NIST-4 database showed that the proposed algorithm is able to model all the fingerprint orientation patterns except those with very poor quality images where the orientation information cannot be clearly extracted.