A local feature vector for an adaptive hybrid fingerprint matcher

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce a hybrid fingerprint matcher which consists of two stages: local minutiae matching stage and consolidation stage. In the former stage, each minutia in the fingerprint is represented by a local feature vector which is built from the features of the neighboring minutiae within a fixed-radius circle around it. The features of each neighboring minutia are defined according to the spatial relationship with the central minutia and used for matching task. New calculation methods of the adaptive matching conditions for two neighboring minutiae and the local similarity score between two central minutiae are introduced. The latter stage performs multiple alignments based on the pairs of matching minutiae to produce the final matching score between two fingerprints. Extensive experiments over a public database used in Fingerprint Verification Competition 2002 (FVC2002) prove a considerable improvement in accuracy of our proposed algorithm against some well-known techniques and Top 5 participants of FVC2002.