White-Box Evaluation of Fingerprint Matchers: Robustness to Minutiae Perturbations

Published

January 6, 2021

Author(s)

Steven Grosz, Joshua J. Engelsma, Nicholas G. Paulter Jr., Anil K. Jain

Abstract

Prevailing evaluations of fingerprint recognition systems have been performed as end-to-end black-box tests of fingerprint identification or authentication accuracy. However, performance of the end-to-end system is subject to errors arising in any of its constituent modules, including: fingerprint scanning, preprocessing, feature extraction, and matching. While a few studies have conducted standalone evaluations of the fingerprint reader and feature extraction modules of fingerprint recognition systems, little work has been devoted towards white-box evaluations of the fingerprint matching module. We report results of a controlled, white-box evaluation of one open-source and two commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) minutiae-based matchers in terms of their robustness against controlled perturbations (random noise and non-linear distortions) introduced into the input minutiae feature sets. Our white-box evaluations reveal that the performance of fingerprint minutiae matchers are more susceptible to non-linear distortion and missing minutiae than spurious minutiae and small positional displacements of the minutiae locations.

Proceedings Title

2020 INTERNATIONAL JOINT CONFERENCE ON BIOMETRICS

Conference Dates

September 27-30, 2020

Conference Location

Houston, TX, US

Pub Type

Conferences

Download Paper

https://doi.org/10.1109/IJCB48548.2020.9304918

Local Download

Keywords

Fingerprint recognition systems, minutiaematching module, white-box evaluation, non-linear distortion, uncertainty analysis

Citation

Grosz, S. , Engelsma, J. , Paulter Jr., N. and Jain, A. (2021), White-Box Evaluation of Fingerprint Matchers: Robustness to Minutiae Perturbations, 2020 INTERNATIONAL JOINT CONFERENCE ON BIOMETRICS, Houston, TX, US, [online], https://doi.org/10.1109/IJCB48548.2020.9304918, https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=929189 (Accessed October 13, 2025)