Augmented fingerprint minutiae vicinity

A local-area based fingerprint minutiae vicinity can be represented in a self-aligned way and achieves better robustness for recognition than a global minutiae template whose global geometric references (e.g., core or delta) are usually unstable to locate. However, local comparison based on vicinities ignores the global topology and thus still has potential to improve in performance if some stable global information can be fused in vicinities. We construct in this paper an augmented minutia vicinity, which incorporates more contextual minutiae information. Application of the proposed augmented vicinity to minutiae template protection is tested and demonstrates desirable biometric performance (e.g., FRR = 0.04-0.06 and FAR = 0.001 on the FVC2002DB2_A database) with roughly 70-bit complexity against reversing a binary protected augmented vicinity.