Impact of Finger Type in Contactless Fingerprint Verification

Abstract

Contactless fingerprint authentication has gained popularity as a field of research in biometrics in recent years. Unlike traditional fingerprint recognition systems that require direct contact of the person’s finger with the sensor, contactless fingerprint systems offer several advantages, among them ease of capture and cost-effectiveness. Despite the progress made in this field, poor contrast, background noise, and limited image information continue to pose difficulties for fingerprint recognition in contactless environments. Furthermore, the number of images in published fingerprint biometric datasets for each person is restricted, and there is insufficient data for efficient training. Nevertheless, Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architectures have been widely used, necessitating large databases. To address these issues, this paper introduces a Siamese network designed for the purpose of identity Verification, using the contactless thumb fingerprint modality to enhance recognition results. The Siamese network is able to extract pertinent features from noisy images with low contrast and limited information, even if they have limited information and low contrast. Additionally, this work proposes the use of the contactless thumb fingerprint modality instead of the contactless index fingerprint modality, which is more commonly used in related works. Consequently, the Mobile FingerPrint (MFP) dataset is introduced and constructed for evaluation. Experimental results demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed method, achieving an accuracy of 98.68% for thumb fingerprint Verification.