Minutia Cylinder-Code: A New Representation and Matching Technique for Fingerprint Recognition

• Published in: IEEE transactions on pattern analysis and machine intelligence Vol. 32; no. 12; pp. 2128 - 2141
• Main Authors: Cappelli, Raffaele, Ferrara, Matteo, Maltoni, Davide
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Los Alamitos, CA IEEE 01.12.2010; IEEE Computer Society; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Algorithm design and analysis; Algorithms; Applied sciences; Artificial Intelligence; Biometric Identification - methods; Bit-oriented; Computer architecture; Computer science; control theory; systems; Consolidation; cylinder-code; Cylinders; Data structures; Databases, Factual; Dermatoglyphics; Exact sciences and technology; fingerprint; Fingerprint recognition; Fingerprints; Humans; IEC standards; Image Processing, Computer-Assisted - methods; ISO standards; ISO/IEC 19794-2; local minutiae matching; Pattern analysis; Pattern matching; Pattern recognition; Pattern recognition. Digital image processing. Computational geometry; Recognition; Representations; Robustness; Spatial databases; Three dimensional; Biometrics; Fingerprint; ISO/IEC 19794-2; Bit-oriented; cylinder-code; local minutiae matching; Invariance; Fingerprint identification; Database; Feasibility; Metric; ISO standard; Data structure; Pattern analysis; Artificial intelligence
• ISSN: 0162-8828; 1939-3539
• DOI: 10.1109/TPAMI.2010.52

In this paper, we introduce the Minutia Cylinder-Code (MCC): a novel representation based on 3D data structures (called cylinders), built from minutiae distances and angles. The cylinders can be created starting from a subset of the mandatory features (minutiae position and direction) defined by standards like ISO/IEC 19794-2 (2005). Thanks to the cylinder invariance, fixed-length, and bit-oriented coding, some simple but very effective metrics can be defined to compute local similarities and to consolidate them into a global score. Extensive experiments over FVC2006 databases prove the superiority of MCC with respect to three well-known techniques and demonstrate the feasibility of obtaining a very effective (and interoperable) fingerprint recognition implementation for light architectures.