Study on novel Curvature Features for 3D fingerprint recognition

The human finger is a three-dimensional object. More information will be provided if 3D fingerprint images are available compared with 2D fingerprints. This paper explores 3D fingerprint features, as well as their possible applications. Novel fingerprint features, which are defined as Curvature Features (e.g. curve-skeleton, overall maximum curvatures), are for the first time proposed and investigated in this paper. Those features are then employed to assist more accurate fingerprint matching or classify human gender after analyzing their characteristics. A series of experiments are conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of employing these novel fingerprint features to fingerprint recognition based on the established database with 541 fingers. Results show that an Equal error Rate (EER) of ~15% can be achieved when only curve-skeleton is used for recognition. But, promising EER of ~3.4% is realized by combining curve-skeleton with classical 2D fingerprint features for recognition that indicates the prospect of 3D fingerprint recognition. The proposed overall maximum curvatures are found to be helpful for human gender classification.