End-to-End Pore Extraction and Matching in Latent Fingerprints: Going Beyond Minutiae

Latent fingerprint recognition is not a new topic but it has attracted a lot of attention from researchers in both academia and industry over the past 50 years. With the rapid development of pattern recognition techniques, automated fingerprint identification systems (AFIS) have become more and more ubiquitous. However, most AFIS are utilized for live-scan or rolled/slap prints while only a few systems can work on latent fingerprints with reasonable accuracy. The question of whether taking higher resolution scans of latent fingerprints and their rolled/slap mate prints could help improve the identification accuracy still remains an open question in the forensic community. Because pores are one of the most reliable features besides minutiae to identify latent fingerprints, we propose an end-to-end automatic pore extraction and matching system to analyze the utility of pores in latent fingerprint identification. Hence, this paper answers two questions in the latent fingerprint domain: (i) does the incorporation of pores as level-3 features improve the system performance significantly? and (ii) does the 1,000 ppi image resolution improve the recognition results? We believe that our proposed end-to-end pore extraction and matching system will be a concrete baseline for future latent AFIS development.