On the Effects of Image Quality Degradation on Minutiae- and Ridge-Based Automatic Fingerprint Recognition

TL;DR

This paper investigates how different levels of fingerprint image quality degradation affect the performance of minutiae- and ridge-based automatic fingerprint recognition systems, revealing that ridge-based systems are more robust to quality issues.

Contribution

It provides a comparative analysis of minutiae- and ridge-based fingerprint matchers under various image quality conditions, highlighting the robustness of ridge-based methods.

Findings

Ridge-based systems are more robust to image quality degradation.

Performance declines with decreasing image quality for both systems.

Different image quality criteria impact matcher performance variably.

Abstract

The effect of image quality degradation on the verification performance of automatic fingerprint recognition is investigated. We study the performance of two fingerprint matchers based on minutiae and ridge information under varying fingerprint image quality. The ridge-based system is found to be more robust to image quality degradation than the minutiae-based system for a number of different image quality criteria.