Gabor filters as candidate quality measure for NFIQ 2.0

Quality assessment of biometric fingerprint images is necessary to ensure high biometric performance in biometric recognition systems. We relate the quality of a fingerprint sample to the biometric performance to ensure an objective and performance oriented benchmark. The proposed quality metric is based on Gabor filter responses and is evaluated against eight contemporary quality estimation methods on four datasets using sample utility derived from the separation of genuine and imposter distributions as benchmark. The proposed metric shows performance and consistency approaching that of the composite NFIQ quality assessment algorithm and is thus a candidate for inclusion in a feature vector introducing the NFIQ 2.0 metric.