Reconstruction-free matching for fingerprint sweep sensors

Many different types of silicon fingerprint sweep sensors presently enter the biometrics market. Since they provide small stripe image sequences instead of full fingerprint images, they require new matching algorithms. This paper presents a new one-stage, Viterbi-based matching approach which can be directly applied to the raw sweep sensor output. This is in contrary to the conventional two-stage approach where the stripe image sequences are combined to area images in a reconstruction step and subsequently fed into a recognition system appropriate for area images. Simulation results prove that the new algorithm is superior to the conventional two-stage system in terms of recognition performance and maximum allowed finger sweeping speed.