Local Pre-Conditioning and Quality Enhancement to Handle Different Data Complexities in Contactless Fingerprint Classification

Abstract

Biometric authentication systems have always been a fascinating approach to meet personalized security. Among the major existing solutions fingerprint-biometrics have gained widespread attention; yet, guaranteeing scalability and reliability over real-time demands remains a challenge. Despite innovations, the recent COVID-19 pandemic has capped the efficacy of the existing touch-based two-dimensional fingerprint detection models. Though, touchless fingerprint detection is considered as a viable alternative; yet, the real-time data complexities like non-linear textural patterns, dusts, non-uniform local conditions like illumination, contrast, orientation make it complex for realization. Moreover, the likelihood of ridge discontinuity and spatio-temporal texture damages can limit its efficacy. Considering these complexities, here, we focused on improving the input image intrinsic feature characteristics. More specifically, applied normalization, ridge orientation estimation, ridge frequency estimation, ridge masking and Gabor filtering over the input touchless fingerprint images. The proposed model mainly focusses on reducing FPR & EER by dividing the input image in to blocks and classify each input block as recoverable and nonrecoverable image block. Finally, an image with higher recoverable blocks with sufficiently large intrinsic features were considered for feature extraction and classification. The Proposed method outperforms when compared with the existing state of the art methods by achieving an accuracy of 94.72%, precision of 98.84%, recall of 97.716%, F-Measure 0.9827, specificity of 95.38% and a reduced EER of about 0.084.