Towards Using Police Officers' Business Smartphones for Contactless Fingerprint Acquisition and Enabling Fingerprint Comparison against Contact-Based Datasets

Toward Synthetic Physical Fingerprint Targets

Biometric fingerprint identification hinges on the reliability of its sensors; however, calibrating and standardizing these sensors poses significant challenges, particularly in regards to repeatability and data diversity. To tackle these issues, we propose methodologies for fabricating synthetic 3D fingerprint targets, or phantoms, that closely emulate real human fingerprints. These phantoms enable the precise evaluation and validation of fingerprint sensors under controlled and repeatable conditions. Our research employs laser engraving, 3D printing, and CNC machining techniques, utilizing different materials. We assess the phantoms' fidelity to synthetic fingerprint patterns, intra-class variability, and interoperability across different manufacturing methods. The findings demonstrate that a combination of laser engraving or CNC machining with silicone casting produces finger-like phantoms with high accuracy and consistency for rolled fingerprint recordings. For slap recordings, direct laser engraving of flat silicone targets excels, and in the contactless fingerprint sensor setting, 3D printing and silicone filling provide the most favorable attributes. Our work enables a comprehensive, method-independent comparison of various fabrication methodologies, offering a unique perspective on the strengths and weaknesses of each approach. This facilitates a broader understanding of fingerprint recognition system validation and performance assessment.

Innovative Solutions for Worn Fingerprints: A Comparative Analysis of Traditional Fingerprint Impression and 3D Printing

Fingerprint recognition systems have achieved widespread integration into various technological devices, including cell phones, computers, door locks, and time attendance machines. Nevertheless, individuals with worn fingerprints encounter challenges when attempting to unlock original fingerprint systems, which results in disruptions to their daily activities. This study explores two distinct methods for fingerprint backup: traditional fingerprint impression and 3D printing technologies. Unlocking tests were conducted on commonly available optical fingerprint lock-equipped cell phones to assess the efficacy of these methods, particularly in unlocking with worn fingerprints. The research findings indicated that the traditional fingerprint impression method exhibited high fidelity in reproducing fingerprint patterns, achieving an impressive unlocking success rate of 97.8% for imprinting unworn fingerprints. However, when dealing with worn fingerprints, the traditional fingerprint impression technique showed a reduced unlocking success rate, progressively decreasing with increasing degrees of finger wear. In contrast, 3D-printed backup fingerprints, with image processing and optimization of ridge height, mitigated the impact of fingerprint wear on the unlocking capability, resulting in an unlocking success rate of 84.4% or higher. Thus, the utilization of 3D printing technology proves advantageous for individuals with severely worn or incomplete fingerprints, providing a viable solution for unforeseen circumstances.

Fingerprint Systems: Sensors, Image Acquisition, Interoperability and Challenges

The fingerprint is a widely adopted biometric trait in forensic and civil applications. Fingerprint biometric systems have been investigated using contact prints and latent and contactless images which range from low to high resolution. While the imaging techniques are advancing with sensor variations, the input fingerprint images also vary. A general fingerprint recognition pipeline consists of a sensor module to acquire images, followed by feature representation, matching and decision modules. In the sensor module, the image quality of the biometric traits significantly affects the biometric system's accuracy and performance. Imaging modality, such as contact and contactless, plays a key role in poor image quality, and therefore, paying attention to imaging modality is important to obtain better performance. Further, underlying physical principles and the working of the sensor can lead to their own forms of distortions during acquisition. There are certain challenges in each module of the fingerprint recognition pipeline, particularly sensors, image acquisition and feature representation. Present reviews in fingerprint systems only analyze the imaging techniques in fingerprint sensing that have existed for a decade. However, the latest emerging trends and recent advances in fingerprint sensing, image acquisition and their challenges have been left behind. Since the present reviews are either obsolete or restricted to a particular subset of the fingerprint systems, this work comprehensively analyzes the state of the art in the field of contact-based, contactless 2D and 3D fingerprint systems and their challenges in the aspects of sensors, image acquisition and interoperability. It outlines the open issues and challenges encountered in fingerprint systems, such as fingerprint performance, environmental factors, acceptability and interoperability, and alternate directions are proposed for a better fingerprint system.

Mobile Contactless Fingerprint Recognition: Implementation, Performance and Usability Aspects

This work presents an automated contactless fingerprint recognition system for smartphones. We provide a comprehensive description of the entire recognition pipeline and discuss important requirements for a fully automated capturing system. In addition, our implementation is made publicly available for research purposes. During a database acquisition, a total number of 1360 contactless and contact-based samples of 29 subjects are captured in two different environmental situations. Experiments on the acquired database show a comparable performance of our contactless scheme and the contact-based baseline scheme under constrained environmental influences. A comparative usability study on both capturing device types indicates that the majority of subjects prefer the contactless capturing method. Based on our experimental results, we analyze the impact of the current COVID-19 pandemic on fingerprint recognition systems. Finally, implementation aspects of contactless fingerprint recognition are summarized.