Crowd powered latent Fingerprint Identification: Fusing AFIS with examiner markups

Automatic matching of poor quality latent fingerprints to rolled/slap fingerprints using an Automated Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS) is still far from satisfactory. Therefore, it is a common practice to have a latent examiner mark features on a latent for improving the hit rate of the AFIS. We propose a synergistic crowd powered latent identification framework where multiple latent examiners and the AFIS work in conjunction with each other to boost the identification accuracy of the AFIS. Given a latent, the candidate list output by the AFIS is used to determine the likelihood that a hit at rank-1 was found. A latent for which this likelihood is low is crowdsourced to a pool of latent examiners for feature markup. The manual markups are then input to the AFIS to increase the likelihood of making a hit in the reference database. Experimental results show that the fusion of an AFIS with examiner markups improves the rank-1 identification accuracy of the AFIS by 7.75% (using six markups) on the 500 ppi NIST SD27, 11.37% (using two markups) on the 1000 ppi ELFT-EFS public challenge database, and by 2.5% (using a single markup) on the 1000 ppi RS&A database against 250,000 rolled prints in the reference database.