In this study, the authors present a hierarchical algorithm to register a partial fingerprint against a full fingerprint using only the orientation fields. In the first level, they shortlist possible locations for registering the partial fingerprint in the full fingerprint using a normalised correlation measure, taking various rotations into account. As a second level, on those candidate locations, they calculate three other similarity measures. They then perform score fusion for all the estimated similarity scores to locate the final registration. By registering a partial fingerprint against a full fingerprint, they can reduce the search space of the minutiae set in the full fingerprint, thereby improving the result of partial fingerprint identification, particularly for poor quality latent fingerprints. They report the rank identification improvements of two minutiae-based automated fingerprint identification systems on the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)-Special Database 27 database when they use the authors hierarchical registration as a pre-alignment. © The Institution of Engineering and Technology 2015.

Comparing a latent fingerprint minutiae set against a ten print fingerprint minutiae set using an automated fingerprint identification system is a challenging problem. This is mainly because latent fingerprints obtained from crime scenes are mostly partial fingerprints, and most automated systems expect approximately the same number of minutiae between query and the reference fingerprint under comparison for good performance. In this work, we propose a methodology to reduce the minutiae set of ten print with respect to that of query latent minutiae set by registering the orientation field of latent fingerprint with the ten print orientation field. By reducing the search space of minutiae from the ten print, we can improve the performance of automated identification systems for latent fingerprints. We report the performance of our registration algorithm on the NIST-SD27 database as well as the improvement in the Rank Identification accuracy of a standard minutiae-based automated system. © 2014 IEEE.

Fingerprint image quality affects heavily the performance of fingerprint recognition systems. This paper reviews existing approaches for fingerprint image quality computation. We also implement, test and compare a selection of them using the MCYT database including 9000 fingerprint images. Experimental results show that most of the algorithms behave similarly.