Fingerprint biometrics via low-cost sensors and webcams

The diffusion of mobile cameras and webcams is rapidly growing. Unfortunately, images produced by these kinds of sensors during the acquisition of human fingertips are very different from the images obtained by dedicated fingerprint sensors, especially as quality is concerned. At the present stage of the research, fingerprint biometrics can be successfully achieved in real-life applications only by using dedicated sensors and scanners. In the literature a paramount quantity of methods which are extremely effective in processing fingerprints obtained by classical sensors and procedures is presented. In this paper, we investigate new techniques to suitably process the camera images of fingertips in order to produce images which are as similar as possible to the ones coming from dedicated sensors. This will allow for directly reusing the large and valuable experience presented in the literature for fingerprint recognition and verification in environments in which mobile cameras and webcams are already or can easily become available and dedicated devices are not required by the desired security level. The proposed technique encompasses a prefiltering step, the segmentation of the fingertip image, a fingertip registration phase, the dedicated processing techniques for the ridge enhancement, and a post-processing phase. In our research we tested the identification capability of the proposed methods by using a state-of-the-art, public software for minutiae extraction and matching. The effects of different registration algorithms on the identification accuracy are also discussed and the final system has been compared with the use of commercial dedicated sensors.