Fingerprint Orientation Field Research Articles

Recovery of Incomplete Fingerprints Based on Ridge Texture and Orientation Field

The recovery of mutilated fingerprints plays an important role in improving the accuracy of fingerprint recognition and the speed of identity retrieval, so it is crucial to recover mutilated fingerprints efficiently and accurately. In this paper, we propose a method for the restoration of mutilated fingerprints based on the ridge texture and orientation field. First, the part to be restored is identified via the local quality of the fingerprint, and a mask image is generated. Second, a novel dual-stream fingerprint restoration network named IFSR is designed, which contains two branches, namely an orientation prediction branch guided by the fingerprint orientation field and a detail restoration branch guided by the high-quality fingerprint texture image, through which the damaged region of the mutilated fingerprint is restored. Finally, the method proposed in this paper is validated on a real dataset and an artificially damaged fingerprint dataset. The equal error rate (EER) achieved on the DB1, DB2, and DB4 datasets of FVC2002 is 0.10%, 0.12%, and 0.20%, respectively, while on the DB1, DB2, and DB4 datasets of FVC2004, the EER reaches 1.13%, 2.00%, and 0.27%, respectively. On the artificially corrupted fingerprint dataset, the restoration method achieves a peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) of 16.6735.

Hierarchical Perceptual Noise Injection for Social Media Fingerprint Privacy Protection.

Billions of people share images from their daily lives on social media every day. However, their biometric information (e.g., fingerprints) could be easily stolen from these images. The threat of fingerprint leakage from social media has created a strong desire to anonymize shared images while maintaining image quality, since fingerprints act as a lifelong individual biometric password. To guard the fingerprint leakage, adversarial attack that involves adding imperceptible perturbations to fingerprint images have emerged as a feasible solution. However, existing works of this kind are either weak in black-box transferability or cause the images to have an unnatural appearance. Motivated by the visual perception hierarchy (i.e., high-level perception exploits model-shared semantics that transfer well across models while low-level perception extracts primitive stimuli that result in high visual sensitivity when a suspicious stimulus is provided), we propose FingerSafe, a hierarchical perceptual protective noise injection framework to address the above mentioned problems. For black-box transferability, we inject protective noises into the fingerprint orientation field to perturb the model-shared high-level semantics (i.e., fingerprint ridges). Considering visual naturalness, we suppress the low-level local contrast stimulus by regularizing the response of the Lateral Geniculate Nucleus. Our proposed FingerSafe is the first to provide feasible fingerprint protection in both digital (up to 94.12%) and realistic scenarios (Twitter and Facebook, up to 68.75%). Our code can be found at https://github.com/nlsde-safety-team/FingerSafe.

Exploring the Power of Simplicity: A New State-of-the-Art in Fingerprint Orientation Field Estimation

Exploring the Power of Simplicity: A New State-of-the-Art in Fingerprint Orientation Field Estimation

An effective fingerprint orientation field estimation method using differential values of grayscale intensity.

Fingerprint orientation field (OF) estimation is important for basic fingerprint image processing and impacts the accuracy of fingerprint image enhancements, such as Gabor filters. In this article, we introduce an OF estimation algorithm based on differential values of grayscale intensity and examine the accuracy and reliability of the proposed algorithm by applying it to fingerprint images processed using Gaussian blurring and the Gaussian white noise process. The experimental results indicate that the OF estimation reliability of the proposed algorithm is higher than the gradient-based method and the power spectral density (PSD) based method in low quality fingerprints. The proposed algorithm is especially useful in noisy fingerprint images, where the OF estimation reliability of the algorithm is 6.46% and 32.93% higher than the gradient-based method and the PSD-based method, respectively.

A Customized Semantic Segmentation Network for the Fingerprint Singular Point Detection

As one of the most important and obvious global features for fingerprints, the singular point plays an essential role in fingerprint registration and fingerprint classification. To date, the singular point detection methods in the literature can be generally divided into two categories: methods based on traditional digital image processing and those on deep learning. Generally speaking, the former requires a high-precision fingerprint orientation field for singular point detection, while the latter just needs the original fingerprint image without preprocessing. Unfortunately, detection rates of these existing methods, either of the two categories above, are still unsatisfactory, especially for the low-quality fingerprint. Therefore, regarding singular point detection as a semantic segmentation of the small singular point area completely and directly, we propose a new customized convolutional neural network called SinNet for segmenting the accurate singular point area, followed by a simple and fast post-processing to locate the singular points quickly. The performance evaluation conducted on the publicly Singular Points Detection Competition 2010 (SPD2010) dataset confirms that the proposed method works best from the perspective of overall indexes. Especially, compared with the state-of-art algorithms, our proposal achieves an increase of 10% in the percentage of correctly detected fingerprints and more than 16% in the core detection rate.

A Survey of the Methods on Fingerprint Orientation Field Estimation

Fingerprint orientation field (FOF) estimation plays a key role in enhancing the performance of the automated fingerprint identification system (AFIS): accurate estimation of FOF can evidently improve the performance of AFIS. However, despite the enormous attention on the FOF estimation research in the past decades, the accurate estimation of FOFs, especially for poor-quality fingerprints, still remains a challenging task. In this paper, we devote to review and categorization of the large number of FOF estimation methods proposed in the specialized literature, with particular attention to the most recent work in this area. Broadly speaking, the existing FOF estimation methods can be grouped into three categories: gradient-based methods, mathematical models-based methods, and learning-based methods. Identifying and explaining the advantages and limitations of these FOF estimation methods is of fundamental importance for fingerprint identification, because only a full understanding of the nature of these methods can shed light on the most essential issues for FOF estimation. In this paper, we make a comprehensive discussion and analysis of these methods concerning their advantages and limitations. We have also conducted experiments using publically available competition dataset to effectively compare the performance of the most relevant algorithms and methods.

A Method for Singular Points Detection Based on Faster-RCNN

Most methods for singular points detection usually depend on the orientation fields of fingerprints, which cannot achieve reliable and accurate detection of poor quality fingerprints. In this study, a new method for fingerprint singular points detection based on Faster-RCNN (Faster Region-based Convolutional Network method) is proposed, which is a two-step process, and an orientation constraint is added in Faster-RCNN to obtain orientation information of singular points. Besides, we designed a convolutional neural network (ConvNet) for singular points detection according to the characteristics of fingerprint images and the existing works. Specifically, the proposed method could extract singular points directly from raw fingerprint images without traditional preprocessing. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. In comparison with other detection algorithms, our method achieves 96.03% detection rate for core points and 98.33% detection rate for delta points on FVC2002 DB1 dataset while 90.75% for core points and 94.87% on NIST SD4 dataset, which outperform other algorithms.

Combining multi-scale composite windows with hierarchical smoothing strategy for fingerprint orientation field computation

BackgroundOrientation field (OF) plays a very significant role in automatic fingerprint recognition systems. Many algorithms have been proposed for the estimation of fingerprints’ OF but it is hard to solve the dilemma of correcting spurious ridge structure and avoiding singularity location deviation, especially for poor images. So far, the following drawbacks still need to be solved for OF construction methods for practical application: (1) How to adaptively choose block scales to resolve the contradiction between accuracy and anti-noise, since small scale is beneficial to accuracy but is sensitive to noise, while large scale is more resistant to noise, but the accuracy is deteriorated. (2) How to construct the genuine OF in the areas close-by singular points and to evade singularity location deviation? Current block based methods give spurious OF estimates in the area near singular points because these areas have large curvature thus the detected singular points deviate from the genuine localizations. When these singular points are used as the anchor for referencing minutiae, it makes the average error of matching or recognition even larger. Therefore, it is essentials to construct the genuine OF in the areas close-by singular points and to evade singularity deviation.MethodsTo overcome the above-mentioned limitations, a novel method, combining a weighted multi-scale composite window (WMCM) with a hierarchical smoothing strategy has been proposed for the computation of fingerprint OF. This method mainly contains two procedures: the approximate OF estimation and the hierarchical OF smoothing. In the first procedure, a series of OFs are established under multiple scales of composite windows by using a gradient based method then a coarse OF is estimated using the weight of each scale determined by a squared gradient consistency. In the second procedure, the OF is first quantized into a two-digitized orientation zone and a two-orientation-zone filtering strategy is adapted to the OF blocks based on a filtering mask obtained after eliminating the isolated blocks. In the end a similar three-digitized orientation zone is performed to obtain an accurate and smooth OF. To validate the performance, the proposed method has been applied to OF computation using the FVC2004 databases and three experiments are designed. Experiment 1 aims to validate whether the weighted multi-scale composite window can balance the dilemma of accuracy and robustness more effectively than the previous works do. Experiment 2 is designed to examine whether the hierarchical smoothing method can correct the spurious ridge flow and preserve the genuine localization of singular points. The purpose of experiment 3 is to test the performance of the proposed method on OF reconstruction in low quality fingerprint images. The fingerprint databases FVC 2004 DB1–DB4 are employed in this study.ResultsThe results of experiment I shows that the proposed method is capable to extract the information of OF reliably and it is more robust against singularity localization deviation in comparison with the other three gradient based methods. The results of experiment II indicates that the proposed smoothing method can balance the contradiction in correcting spurious ridge structures and preserving genuine singularity localization. The results of experiment III illustrates that our approach combing WMCW with the hierarchical smoothing method is capable to extract the information of OF ridge reliably and it is more robust against singularity deviation in comparison with the other three gradient based methods. In a word, the experiment results demonstrate that the proposed method can correct spurious ridge structure and meanwhile avoid singularity deviation compared with the previous works.ConclusionsA novel gradient based algorithm has been proposed which is more reliable for the estimation of the ridge information for fingerprint OF and is more accurate in preserving the singularity localization. Compared with the previously proposed gradient based methods, the advantages of the proposed RBSF lie in three aspects. Firstly a weighted multi-scale composite window is put forward to replace the single window used by conventional gradient based methods and to adaptively choose the scales of the blocks. Secondly, a hierarchical smoothing strategy is proposed to enhance the OF by using the two-orientation-zone filtering and the three-orientation-zone filtering, aiming to correct the spurious ridges and preserving the genuine location of singular points. Finally, three experiments are designed to test the proposed algorithm together with other popular gradient based methods on real fingerprint images, which are selected from different categories and all are suffering from obvious noise effects. All the experiment results show that the proposed method is superior with respect to reliable OF construction and avoiding singularity localization deviation.

Möbius Moduli for Fingerprint Orientation Fields

We propose a novel fingerprint descriptor, namely Mobius moduli, measuring local deviation of orientation fields (OF) of fingerprints from conformal fields, and we propose a method to robustly measure them, based on tetraquadrilaterals to approximate a conformal modulus locally with one due to a Mobius transformation. Conformal fields arise by the approximation of fingerprint OFs given by zero-pole models, which are determined by the singular points and a rotation. This approximation is very coarse, e.g., for fingerprints with no singular points (arch type), the zero-pole model’s OF has parallel lines. Quadratic differential (QD) models, which are obtained from zero-pole models by adding suitable singularities outside the observation window, approximate real fingerprints much better. For example, for arch type fingerprints, parallel lines along the distal joint change slowly into circular lines around the nail furrow. Still, QD models are not fully realistic because, for example along the central axis of arch type fingerprints, ridge line curvatures usually first increase and then decrease again. It is impossible to model this with QDs, which, due to complex analyticity, also produce conformal fields only. In fact, as one of many applications of the new descriptor, we show, using histograms of curvatures and conformality indices (log of the absolute values of the Mobius moduli), that local deviation from conformality in fingerprints occurs systematically at high curvature which is not reflected by state-of-the-art fingerprint models as are used, for instance, in the well-known synthetic fingerprint generation tool SFinGe and these differences robustly discriminate real prints from SFinGe’s synthetic prints.

A Novel Method of Fingerprint Orientation Field Reconstruction

Orientation field is important for fingerprint image enhancement, which is also crucial for matching between fingerprint templates. In some fingerprint application such as holder identification of legal ID document, it is difficult to store both the feature data and the data of orientation field because of the limitation on storage capacity of chip. To solve above problem, a novel method of fingerprint orientation field reconstruction is presented in this paper, in which the fingerprint orientation field is expressed through 2D Fourier Expansion, low dimensional matrix data that can reconstruct the orientation field precisely are calculated and stored. Experimental results show that the method can effectively solve the problem that storage capacity of legal document chip is not enough to application of fingerprint algorithm.

Performance Improvement in Gradient based Algorithm for the Estimation of Fingerprint Orientation Fields

Performance Improvement in Gradient based Algorithm for the Estimation of Fingerprint Orientation Fields

Combining weighted linear project analysis with orientation diffusion for fingerprint orientation field reconstruction

This paper presents a novel algorithm for reconstructing the fingerprint orientation field (FOF). The basic idea of the algorithm is to reconstruct the FOF by combining weighted linear project analysis with orientation diffusion. We first compute the weight values of point gradients according to the similarity of point orientations. In the second procedure, the qualities of blocks are assessed by the coherence of point orientations, and then the block orientation with high quality are estimated by the weighted linear projection analysis based on the vector set of point gradients. The fingerprint blocks that will be reconstructed is selected by the priority of them in the third procedure. In the end, the FOF is reconstructed by orientation diffusion based on the reconstruction priorities of blocks. To validate the performance, the proposed method has been applied to fingerprint enhancement, fingerprint singularity detection, fingerprint minutiae extraction and fingerprint matching using the FVC2000 and FVC2004 databases. The experiments show that the proposed method is more accurate and more reliable, and it is more robust against noise.

Sparse coding based orientation estimation for latent fingerprints

Fingerprint orientations are often used to describe the ridge flow patterns, providing useful features for further fingerprint processing and recognition. Although significant advances have been achieved for orientation estimation, it is still challenging to reliably estimate the orientations for latent fingerprints, which are usually of poor quality with unclear ridge structure and various overlapping patterns. Motivated by the recent success of sparse coding in image denoising and reconstruction, this paper proposes an orientation estimation algorithm based on dictionary learning and sparse coding for latent fingerprints. First, a texture image is obtained by decomposition of latent image with a total variation model. The structured noise is greatly reduced from the texture image. Second, we propose a multi-scale sparse coding method for iterative estimation of local ridge orientations on the texture image. Multi-scale dictionaries are learned from the orientation fields of good quality fingerprints to capture the prior knowledge of various orientation patterns, and sparse coding is iteratively applied with the increase of patch sizes to correct the corrupted orientations of latent fingerprint. The proposed algorithm can work well to reduce the effect of various noise and restore the corrupted orientations while maintain the details of singular region. Experimental results and comparisons on NIST SD27 latent fingerprint database are presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

An improved fingerprint orientation field extraction method based on quality grading scheme

Orientation pattern is an important feature for characterizing fingerprint and plays a very important role in the automatic fingerprint identification system (AFIS). Conventional gradient based methods are popular but very sensitive to noise. In this paper, we present an improved fingerprint orientation field (FOF) extraction method based on quality grading scheme. In order to effectively remove the noise, the point orientations are fitted by using 2D discrete orthogonal polynomial. The role of the gradient modulus is taken into full account, and the weights of the point orientations are obtained by computing the similarity of the fitted point orientations. The block qualities are assessed by the coherence of point orientations and the block orientations are estimated based on quality grading scheme. In the proposed method, it does not need any prior knowledge of singular points. To validate the performance, the proposed method has been applied to fingerprint singularity detection and fingerprint recognition. We compared the proposed method with other state-of-the-art fingerprint orientation estimation algorithms. Our statistical experiments show that the proposed method can significantly improve in both singular point detection and matching rates, and it is more robust against noise.

Perfect fingerprint orientation fields by locally adaptive global models

Fingerprint recognition is widely used for verification and identification in many commercial, governmental and forensic applications. The orientation field (OF) plays an important role at various processing stages in fingerprint recognition systems. OFs are used for image enhancement, fingerprint alignment, for fingerprint liveness detection, fingerprint alteration detection and fingerprint matching. In this study, a novel approach is presented to globally model an OF combined with locally adaptive methods. The authors show that this model adapts perfectly to the ‘true OF’ in the limit. This perfect OF is described by a small number of parameters with straightforward geometric interpretation. Applications are manifold: Quick expert marking of very poor quality (for instance latent) OFs, high-fidelity low parameter OF compression and a direct road to ground truth OFs markings for large databases, say. In this contribution, they describe an algorithm to perfectly estimate OF parameters automatically or semi-automatically, depending on image quality, and they establish the main underlying claim of high-fidelity low parameter OF compression.

A Technique to Improve Ridge Flows of Fingerprint Orientation Fields Estimation

This paper is under in-depth investigation due to suspicion of possible plagiarism on a high similarity index An accurate estimated fingerprint orientation fields is a significant step for detection of singular points. Gradient-based methods are frequently used for estimating orientation fields but those methods are sensitive to noise. Fingerprints that perfect quality are seldom. They may be corrupted and degraded due to impression conditions or variations on skin. Enhancement of ridge flows improved the structure of orientation fields and hence increased the number of true singular points thereby conducting the overall performance of the classification process. In this paper, we provided discussion on the technique and implementation to improve local ridge flows segmentation; secondly, identification of noise areas and marking; thirdly, estimation of fingerprint orientation fields using gradient-based method and finally, enhancement of ridge flows using minimum variance of the cross centre block direction in squared gradients. A standard fingerprint database is used for testing of proposed technique to verify the tier of effectivity of algorithm. The experimental results suggest that our enhanced algorithm achieves visibly better ridge flows compare to other methods.

Fingerprint orientation field extraction using gradient-based weighted averaging

This paper presents a new algorithm for extracting the fingerprint orientation field (FOF). The basic idea of the algorithm is to compute the ridge orientation by combining weighted averaging with angle doubling for fingerprint orientation field extraction. The similarities of point orientations are first computed, and then the weight values of point gradients can be obtained according to the similarity. In the second procedure, to calculate the local ridge orientation, the angles of gradient vectors are doubled and the weighted averaging of moduli of gradient vectors is implement. The FOF is extracted by iterating weighted averaging based on overlapped window. The experiments with the database of FVC2004 are carried out using various FOF extraction methods. The experimental results show, compared to other extraction algorithms, the accuracy and reliability of the FOF extracted by our method have improved to some extent.

Fingerprint orientation field extraction using gradient-based weighted averaging

Fingerprint orientation field extraction using gradient-based weighted averaging

Fingerprint Enhancement Algorithm Based-on Gradient Magnitude for the Estimation of Orientation Fields

An accurate estimation of fingerprint orientation fields is an important step in the fingerprint classification process. Gradient-based approaches are often used for estimating orientation fields of ridge structures but this method is susceptible to noise. Enhancement of fingerprint images improves the ridge-valley structure and increases the number of correct features thereby conducing the overall performance of the classification process. In this paper, we propose an algorithm to improve ridge orientation textures using gradient magnitude. That algorithm has four steps; firstly, normalization of fingerprint image, secondly, foreground extraction, thirdly, noise areas identification and marking using gradient coherence and finally, enhancement of grey level. We have used standard fingerprint database NIST-DB14 for testing of proposed algorithm to verify the degree of efficiency of algorithm. The experiment results suggest that our enhanced algorithm achieves visibly better noise resistance with other methods.

Enhanced Ridge Direction for the Estimation of Fingerprint Orientation Fields

An accurate estimation of fingerprint orientation fields is an important step in the fingerprint classification process. Gradient-based approaches are often used for estimating orientation fields of ridge structures but this method is susceptible to noise. Enhancement of ridge direction improves the structure of orientation fields and increases the number of correct features thereby conducing the overall performance of the classification process. In this paper, we propose an algorithm to improve orientation field structures using variance of gradient. That algorithm have two steps; firstly, estimation of fingerprint orientation fields using gradient-based method, and finally, enhancement of ridge direction using minimum variance of the cross center block direction. We have used standard fingerprint database NIST-DB14 for testing of proposed algorithm to verify the degree of efficiency of algorithm. The experiment results suggest that our enhanced algorithm achieves visibly better noise resistance with other methods.