Investigating the impact of demographic factors on contactless fingerprints interoperability

Contactless fingerprints have continued to grow interoperability as a faster and more convenient replacement for contact fingerprints, and with covid-19 now starting to be a past event the need for hygienic alternatives has only grown after the sudden focus during the pandemic. Though, past works have shown issues with the interoperability of contactless prints from both kiosk devices and phone fingerprint collection apps. The focus of the paper is the evaluation of match performance between contact and contactless fingerprints, and the evaluation of match score bias based on skin demographics. AUC results indicate contactless match performance is as good as contact fingerprints, while phone contactless fingerprints fall short. Additionally, bias found for melanin showed specific ranges effected in both low melanin values and high melanin values.