Online and offline fingerprint template update using minutiae: An experimental comparison

Although the template fingerprint collected during the registration phase of personal verification systems can be considered in principle as representative of the subject identity, some recent works pointed out that it is not completely able to follow the intra-class variations of the fingerprint shape. Accordingly, making these systems adaptive to these variations is one of the most interesting problems, and is often called as the "template updating" problem. In this paper, two different approaches for fingerprint template updating are compared by experiments. The first one, already proposed in other works, relies on the concept of "online" template updating, that is, the fingerprint template is updated when the system is operating. As alternative, we propose the "offline" template update, which requires the collection of a representative batch of samples when the system is operating. They concur to the template updating when the system is offline, that is, it is not operating. Preliminary experiments carried out on the FVC data sets allow to point out some differences among the investigated approaches.