High Resolution Fingerprint Retrieval Based on Pore Indexing and Graph Comparison

Fingerprint retrieval aims to identify a query fingerprint image in a large database using indexing algorithms. Because of the abundant level 3 pore features within high-resolution fingerprint images, pore-based fingerprint retrieval algorithms have been rapidly developed. These retrieval algorithms, however, suffer from severe calculation-consuming problems with the pores increasing. This paper proposes a pore-based fingerprint retrieval method for high-resolution fingerprint images. The proposed method consists of two main steps. 1) In the pore indexing step, an indexing space is constructed using the binary codes of pores in enrolled images. Then, a designed graph-based searching algorithm searches the nearest neighbors of pores from the query image to construct one-to-many correspondences. 2) In the refinement step, the one-to-many correspondences are refined by a random walker-based graph comparison algorithm to remove the false correspondences. The remained nearest neighbors are used to calculate the similarities between the query image and the enrolled images. The proposed method is evaluated on two databases, showing that our method achieves better retrieval accuracies with a higher speed than the existing pore-based retrieval algorithms.