Fast Pore Comparison for High Resolution Fingerprint Images Based on Multiple Co-Occurrence Descriptors and Local Topology Similarities

Pore-based fingerprint recognition has been researched for decades. Many algorithms have been proposed to improve the recognition accuracy of the system. However, the accuracies are always improved at the cost of speed. This article proposes a novel method to compare the pores in high-resolution fingerprint images using the popular coarse-to-fine strategy. A multiple spatial pairwise local co-occurrence descriptor is proposed to improve the calculation of the similarities between pores. It calculates multiple local co-occurrence statistics for each pore using its neighbors. The proposed method can establish correspondences between pores more accurately. The refinement of the correspondences is then achieved by using a local topology-preserving matching algorithm. The algorithm uses rotational invariant local structures and pore pair local topology similarities to calculate the cost of each correspondence. It can remove the mismatches more accurately and efficiently. The experimental results on two high-resolution fingerprint image databases show that the proposed algorithm perform well in both accuracy and speed comparing to the existing algorithms.