Current Projects

Fingerprint Reconstruction From Minutiae

Original fingerprint with minutiae overlaid.	Reconstructed fingerprint with minutiae extracted from original fingerprint overlaid.

Fingerprint matching systems generally use four types of representation schemes: grayscale image, phase image, skeleton image, and minutiae, among which minutiae-based representation is the most widely adopted one. The compactness of minutiae representation has created an impression that the minutiae template does not contain sufficient information to allow the reconstruction of the original grayscale fingerprint image. This belief has now been shown to be false; several algorithms have been proposed that can reconstruct fingerprint images from minutiae templates. These techniques try to either reconstruct the skeleton image, which is then converted into the grayscale image, or reconstruct the grayscale image directly from the minutiae template. However, they have a common drawback: many spurious minutiae, not included in the original minutiae template, are generated in the reconstructed image. Moreover, some of these reconstruction techniques can only generate a partial fingerprint. We proposed a novel fingerprint reconstruction algorithm to reconstruct the phase image, which is then converted into the grayscale image. The proposed reconstruction algorithm not only gives the whole fingerprint, but the reconstructed fingerprint contains very few spurious minutiae.

J. Feng and A. K. Jain, "Fingerprint Reconstruction: From Minutiae to Phase", IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, Vol. 33, No. 2, pp. 209-223, February, 2011.

Jianjiang Feng, Anil K. Jain, “FM Model Based Fingerprint Reconstruction from Minutiae Template,” pp. 544-553, ICB 2009.