A Region-based Alignment-free Partial Fingerprint Matching

Fingerprint is one of the most researched biometrics and applied to many applications like boarder security, access security, security of electronic devices to name a few. However, alignment and matching of partial fingerprints convincingly is still a challenging problem. This paper proposes a region based partial fingerprint matching approach that matches the fingerprints without aligning them. The approach focuses on extracting the matching regions in unaligned fingerprints. As extraction of regions happens without alignment, a new similarity metric is proposed that can compute similarity value between unaligned fingerprints. The results demonstrate that the proposed approach can eliminate the need for aligning the fingerprints without affecting the accuracy. The popular Fingerprint Verification Competition (FVC) 2002 dataset is used for conducting experiments. Moreover, the results of fingerprint recognition are compared with the best alignment based fingerprint matching techniques.