A Fingerprint-Based Verification Framework Using Harris and SURF Feature Detection Algorithms

Fingerprint Recognition in Forensic Scenarios

Fingerprints are unique patterns used as biometric keys because they allow an individual to be unambiguously identified, making their application in the forensic field a common practice. The design of a system that can match the details of different images is still an open problem, especially when applied to large databases or, to real-time applications in forensic scenarios using mobile devices. Fingerprints collected at a crime scene are often manually processed to find those that are relevant to solving the crime. This work proposes an efficient methodology that can be applied in real time to reduce the manual work in crime scene investigations that consumes time and human resources. The proposed methodology includes four steps: (i) image pre-processing using oriented Gabor filters; (ii) the extraction of minutiae using a variant of the Crossing Numbers method which include a novel ROI definition through convex hull and erosion followed by replacing two or more very close minutiae with an average minutiae; (iii) the creation of a model that represents each minutia through the characteristics of a set of polygons including neighboring minutiae; (iv) the individual search of a match for each minutia in different images using metrics on the absolute and relative errors. While in the literature most methodologies look to validate the entire fingerprint model, connecting the minutiae or using minutiae triplets, we validate each minutia individually using n-vertex polygons whose vertices are neighbor minutiae that surround the reference. Our method also reveals robustness against false minutiae since several polygons are used to represent the same minutia, there is a possibility that even if there are false minutia, the true polygon is present and identified; in addition, our method is immune to rotations and translations. The results show that the proposed methodology can be applied in real time in standard hardware implementation, with images of arbitrary orientations.

A Deep Neural Framework for Real-Time Vehicular Accident Detection Based on Motion Temporal Templates

Vehicular accident prediction and detection has recently garnered curiosity and large amounts of attention in machine learning applications and related areas, due to its peculiar and fascinating application potentials in the development of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) that play a pivotal role in the success of emerging smart cities. In this paper, we present a new vision-based framework for real-time vehicular accident prediction and detection, based on motion temporal templates and fuzzy time-slicing. The presented framework proceeds in a stepwise fashion, starting with automatically detecting moving objects (i.e., on-road vehicles or roadside pedestrians), followed by dynamically keep tracking of the detected moving objects based on temporal templates, clustering and supervised learning. Then, an extensive set of local features is extracted from the temporal templates of moving objects. Finally, an effective deep neural network (DNN) model is trained on the extracted features to detect abnormal vehicle behavioral patterns and thus predict an accident just before it occurs. The experiments on real-world vehicular accident videos demonstrate that the framework can yield mostly promising results by achieving a hit rate of 98.5% with a false alarm rate of 4.2% that compare very favorably to those from existing approaches, while still being able to deliver delay guarantees for realtime traffic monitoring and surveillance applications.

Robust Fingerprint Minutiae Extraction and Matching Based on Improved SIFT Features

Minutiae feature extraction and matching are not only two crucial tasks for identifying fingerprints, but also play an eminent role as core components of automated fingerprint recognition (AFR) systems, which first focus primarily on the identification and description of the salient minutiae points that impart individuality to each fingerprint and differentiate one fingerprint from another, and then matching their relative placement in a candidate fingerprint and previously stored fingerprint templates. In this paper, an automated minutiae extraction and matching framework is presented for identification and verification purposes, in which an adaptive scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT) detector is applied to high-contrast fingerprints preprocessed by means of denoising, binarization, thinning, dilation and enhancement to improve the quality of latent fingerprints. As a result, an optimized set of highly-reliable salient points discriminating fingerprint minutiae is identified and described accurately and quickly. Then, the SIFT descriptors of the local key-points in a given fingerprint are matched with those of the stored templates using a brute force algorithm, by assigning a score for each match based on the Euclidean distance between the SIFT descriptors of the two matched keypoints. Finally, a postprocessing dual-threshold filter is adaptively applied, which can potentially eliminate almost all the false matches, while discarding very few correct matches (less than 4%). The experimental evaluations on publicly available low-quality FVC2004 fingerprint datasets demonstrate that the proposed framework delivers comparable or superior performance to several state-of-the-art methods, achieving an average equal error rate (EER) value of 2.01%.