Investigating the relationship between fingerprint image quality and skin characteristics

This paper reports the correlations between skin characteristics, such as moisture, oiliness, elasticity, and temperature of the skin, and fingerprint image quality across three sensing technologies. Fingerprint images from the index finger of the dominant hand of 190 individuals, were collected on nine different fingerprint sensors. The sensors included four capacitance sensors, four optical sensors and one thermal fingerprint sensor. Skin characteristics included temperature, moisture, oiliness and elasticity, were measured prior to the initial interaction with each of the individual sensors. The analysis of the full dataset indicated that the sensing technology and interaction type (swipe or touch) were moderately and weakly correlated respectively with image quality scores. Correlation analysis between image quality scores and the skin characteristics were also made on subsets of data, divided by the sensing technology. The results did not identify any significant correlations. This indicates that further work is necessary to determine the type of relationship between the variables, and how they impact image quality and matching performance.