Improving a cost-effective fingerprint verification system by using cascade fusion

When used with a good fingerprint enhancement algorithm, cost-effective and less complex features may perform well for recognition of low-quality fingerprints. Especially, improving systems using such features is a promising point in large-scale fingerprint verification systems. In this study, scores obtained from features which are extracted from the wedge and ring based tessellation of a fingerprint frequency image are fused with the scores of phase-only correlation based matching method. The matching scores obtained from two independent information sources are improved by applying the proposed cascade score-level fusion scheme. In this scheme, first the reliability of the wedge-ring verification scores are evaluated; if the reliability of the wedge-ring features are not sufficient the phase-only correlation scores are used to make a final decision. In order to improve the verification system a Short-Time Fourier Transform (STFT) based enhancement algorithm and complex filtering to detect reference point on a fingerprint image is applied.