Improving Fingerprint Orientation Extraction

Computation of local orientations is a primary step in fingerprint recognition. A large number of approaches have been proposed in the literature, but no systematic quantitative evaluations have been done yet. We implemented and tested several well know methods and a plethora of their variants over a novel, specifically designed, benchmark, made available in the FVC-onGoing framework. We proved that parameter optimizations, pre- and post-processing stages can markedly improve accuracy of the baseline methods on bad quality fingerprints. Finally, in this paper we propose a novel adaptive method which selectively exploits accuracy of local-based analysis and learning-based global methods, thus achieving the overall best performance on a challenging dataset.