Fingerprint Matching with Localized Deep Representation

Compared to minutia-based fingerprint representations, fixed-length representations are attractive due to simple and efficient matching. However, fixed-length fingerprint representations are limited in accuracy when matching fingerprints with different visible areas, which can occur due to different finger poses or acquisition methods. To address this issue, we propose a localized deep representation of fingerprint, named LDRF. By focusing on the discriminative characteristics within local regions, LDRF provides a more robust and accurate fixed-length representation for fingerprints with variable visible areas. LDRF can be adapted to retain information within any valid area, making it highly flexible. The matching scores produced by LDRF also exhibit intuitive statistical characteristics, which led us to propose a matching score normalization technique to mitigate the uncertainty in the cases of very small overlapping area. With this new technique, we can maintain a high level of accuracy and reliability in our fingerprint matching, even as the size of the database grows rapidly. Our experimental results on 21 datasets containing over 140K fingerprints of various finger poses and impression types show that LDRF outperforms other fixed-length representations and is robust to sensing technologies and impression types. Besides, the proposed matching score normalization effectively reduces the false match rate (FMR) in large-scale identification experiments comprising over 5.11 million fingerprints. Specifically, this technique results in a reduction of two orders of magnitude compared to matching without matching score normalization and five orders of magnitude compared to prior works.