Automatic Recognition of Partial Shoeprints Based on Phase-Only Correlation

In this paper, a method for automatically recognizing partial shoeprint images for use in forensic science is presented. The technique uses the phase-only correlation (POC) for shoeprints matching. The main advantage of this method is its capability to match low quality shoeprint images accurately and efficiently. In order to achieve superior performance, the use of a spectral weighting function is also proposed. Experiments were conducted on a database of images of 100 different shoes available on the market. For experimental evaluation, test images including different perturbations such as noise addition, blurring and textured background addition were generated. Results have shown that the proposed method is very practical and provides high performance when processing low quality partial-prints. The use of a weighting function provides an improvement in the recognition rate in particularly difficult cases.