Latent orientation field estimation via convolutional neural network

The orientation field of a fingerprint is crucial for feature extraction and matching. However, estimation of orientation fields in latents is very challenging because latents are usually of poor quality. Inspired by the superiority of convolutional neural networks (ConvNets) for various classification and recognition tasks, we pose latent orientation field estimation in a latent patch to a classification problem, and propose a ConvNet based approach for latent orientation field estimation. The underlying idea is to identify the orientation field of a latent patch as one of a set of representative orientation patterns. To achieve this, 128 representative orientation patterns are learnt from a large number of orientation fields. For each orientation pattern, 10,000 fingerprint patches are selected to train the ConvNet. To simulate the quality of latents, texture noise is added to the training patches. Given image patches extracted from a latent, their orientation patterns are predicted by the trained ConvNet and quilted together to estimate the orientation field of the whole latent. Experimental results on NIST SD27 latent database demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms the state-of-the-art orientation field estimation algorithms and can boost the identification performance of a state-of-the-art latent matcher by score fusion.