Magnetic energy-based feature extraction for low-quality fingerprint images

In fingerprint recognition systems, feature extraction is an important part because of its impact on the final performance of the overall system, particularly, in the case of low-quality images, which poses significant challenges to traditional fingerprint feature extraction methods. In this work, we make two major contributions: First, a novel feature extraction method for low-quality fingerprints images is proposed, which mimics the magnetic energy when attracting iron fillings, and this method is based on image energies attracting uniformly distributed points to form the final features that can describe a fingerprint. Second, we created a new low-quality fingerprints image database to evaluate the proposed method. We used a mobile phone camera to capture the fingerprints of 136 different persons, with five samples for each to obtain 680 fingerprint images in total. To match the computed features, we used the dynamic time warping and evaluated the performance of our system based on k-nearest neighbor classifier. Further, we represent the features using their probability density functions to evaluate the method using some other classifiers. The highest identification accuracy recorded by several experiments reached 95.11% using our in-house database. The experimental results show that the proposed method can be used as a general feature extraction method for other applications.