Abstract

In this article is proposed a new approach to automatic fingerprint verification that is not based on the standard ridge-minutiae-based framework, but in a general-purpose wide baseline matching methodology. Instead of detecting and matching the standard structural features, in the proposed approach local interest points are detected in the fingerprint, then local descriptors are computed in the neighborhood of these points, and afterwards these descriptors are compared using local and global matching procedures. The final verification is carried out by a Bayes classifier. It is important to remark that the local interest points do not correspond to minutiae or singular points, but to local maxima in a scale-space representation of the fingerprint images. The proposed system has 4 variants that are validated using the FVC2004 test protocol. The best variant, which uses an enhanced fingerprint image, SDoG interest points and SIFT descriptors, achieves a FRR of 20.9% and a FAR of 5.7% in the FVC2004-DB1 test database, without using any minutia or singular points’ information.