Performance evaluation of fingerprint orientation field reconstruction methods

Orientation fields (OFs) are a key element of fingerprint recognition systems. They are a requirement for important processing steps such as image enhancement by contextual filtering, and typically, they are estimated from fingerprint images. If information about a fingerprint is available only in form of a stored minutiae template, an OF can be reconstructed from this template up to a certain degree of accuracy. The reconstructed OF can then be used e.g. for fingerprint alignment or as a feature for matching, and thus, for improving directly or indirectly the recognition performance of a system. This study compares reconstruction methods from the literature on a benchmark with ground truth orientation fields. The performance of these methods is evaluated using three metrics measuring the amount of reconstruction errors as well as in terms of computational runtime.