Current Projects

Latent Fingerprint Matching

These two prints (latent on the left and full print on the right), which come from different fingers, look so similar that latent experts made an erroneous identification.

Latent fingerprint identification is of critical importance to law enforcement agencies in identifying suspects. While tremendous progress has been made in plain and rolled fingerprint matching, latent fingerprint matching continues to be a difficult problem. Latent fingerprints are inadvertent impressions left by fingers on surfaces of objects. Poor quality of ridge impressions, small finger area, and large non-linear distortion are the main difficulties in latent fingerprint matching, compared to plain or rolled fingerprint matching. We propose a system for matching latent fingerprints to rolled fingerprints that is needed in forensics applications. In addition to minutiae, we also use extended features, including singularity, ridge quality map, ridge flow map, ridge wavelength map, and skeleton. In order to evaluate the relative importance of each extended feature, these features are incrementally used in the order of their cost in marking by latent experts.

A. A. Paulino, J. Feng, and A. K. Jain, "Latent Fingerprint Matching Using Descriptor-Based Hough Transform", IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, 2012 (To Appear).

A. A. Paulino, J. Feng, and A. K. Jain, "Latent Fingerprint Matching using Descriptor-Based Hough Transform", IJCB, Washington, DC, Oct. 11-13, 2011.

A. K. Jain and J. Feng, "Latent Fingerprint Matching", IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, Vol. 33, No. 1, pp. 88-100, January, 2011.

A. A. Paulino, A. K. Jain and J. Feng, "Latent Fingerprint Matching: Fusion of Manually Marked and Derived Minutiae", SIBGRAPI, Gramado, Brazil, Aug. 30-Sept. 3, 2010.

J. Feng, S. Yoon, and A. K. Jain, "Latent Fingerprint Matching: Fusion of Rolled and Plain Fingerprints", Proc. International Conference on Biometrics (ICB), June, 2009.

Anil K. Jain, Jianjiang Feng, Abhishek Nagar, and Karthik Nandakumar, “On matching latent fingerprints,” CVPR Workshop on Biometrics, 2008.