A Secure Algorithm to Overcome Fingerprint Classification Problems

Fingerprint as a biometric has the most applications in verification and identification systems, because of its specific properties. In identification systems, input image is compared with all of images stored in the database. In huge databases, the comparison will take large amounts of time; Consider FBI databases, for instance. Image classification is one of the approved methods to increase the identification speed. Only one class is assigned to each fingerprint in tradition absolute classification. Various reasons like noise or lack of all the singularity points in captured region, cause the problem in determination of an absolute class for all the images. In this article, a new method based on probabilistic classification is presented. In the proposed approach, a set of classes are considered for each input image with a specific probability. These classes are searched in order of their probabilities priority in matching stage. Experiments on well-known FVC2002 database, exhibit the effect of probable classification clearly. Using only the second and third classes assigned by the proposed method, the identification system achieves about 18% increase in accuracy and 2-3 times speedup in compared to the traditional methods.