A pitfall in fingerprint features extraction

In fingerprint feature extraction, it is perceived that pixel-level image rotation transformation is a lossless transformation process. In this paper, investigation has been conducted on analyzing the underlying mechanisms of fingerprint image rotation processing and potential effect on the major features, mainly minutiae and singular point, of the rotation transformed fingerprint. Qualitative and quantitative analysis have been provided based on the intensive experiments. It is observed that the information integrity of the original fingerprint image can be significantly compromised by the image rotation transformation process, which can cause noticeable singular point change and produce non-negligible number of fake minutiae. It is found that the quantization and interpolation process can change the fingerprint features significantly though they may not change the image visually.