Impact of digital fingerprint image quality on the fingerprint recognition accuracy

• Published in: Multimedia tools and applications Vol. 78; no. 3; pp. 3649 - 3688
• Main Authors: Alsmirat, Mohammad A., Al-Alem, Fatimah, Al-Ayyoub, Mahmoud, Jararweh, Yaser, Gupta, Brij
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York Springer US 01.02.2019; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Accuracy; Biometric recognition systems; Compression ratio; Computer Communication Networks; Computer Science; Data Structures and Information Theory; Digital cameras; Digital imaging; Fingerprint verification; Fingerprinting; Identification systems; Image compression; Image quality; Multimedia Information Systems; Object recognition; Special Purpose and Application-Based Systems; Fingerprint recognition; Raw images; Digital cameras; JPEG compression
• ISSN: 1380-7501; 1573-7721
• DOI: 10.1007/s11042-017-5537-5

Despite the large body of work on fingerprint identification systems, most of it focused on using specialized devices. Due to the high price of such devices, some researchers directed their attention to digital cameras as an alternative source for fingerprints images. However, such sources introduce new challenges related to image quality. Specifically, most digital cameras compress captured images before storing them leading to potential losses of information. This study comes to address the need to determine the optimum ratio of the fingerprint image compression to ensure the fingerprint identification system’s high accuracy. This study is conducted using a large in-house dataset of raw images. Therefore, all fingerprint information is stored in order to determine the compression ratio accurately. The results proved that the used software functioned perfectly until a compression ratio of (30–40%) of the raw images; any higher ratio would negatively affect the accuracy of the used system.