Enhancements to latent fingerprints in forensic applications

Latent fingerprint identification is a challenging task in criminal investigation due to the poor quality of ridge impressions and less region of interest on the fingerprint. In this paper, we propose a semi-automated latent fingerprint identification to markup fingerprint landmarks manually using the image enhancement filters which will improve the identification performance in lights-out mode. It uses the global and local adaptive binarization, and global minutia features with ISO/IEC 19794-2 standard fingerprint templates. In the latent fingerprint identification, the fingerprints are matched with rolled fingerprint database from standard law enforcement database. Also, the latent fingerprints are matched with the plain fingerprints database from the data collected using three different live-scanners. The efficacy of the proposed latent fingerprint identification systems is demonstrated on the standard NIST SD-27 (special database-27) latent prints database.