Parallel versus Hierarchical Fusion of Extended Fingerprint Features

Extended fingerprint features such as pores, dots and incipient ridges have been increasingly attracting attention from researchers and engineers working on automatic fingerprint recognition systems. A variety of methods have been proposed to combine these features with the traditional minutiae features. This paper comparatively analyses the parallel and hierarchical fusion approaches on a high resolution fingerprint image dataset. Based on the results, a novel and more effective hierarchical approach is presented for combining minutiae, pores, dots and incipient ridges.