A hybrid fusion method of fingerprint identification for high security applications

Though fingerprint identification is widely used now, its imperfect performance for some high security applications, such as ATM, the access control of nuclear power stations and exchequers, etc, is still a challenge. In high security applications, an extremely low false accept rate and as low as possible false reject rate are desired at the same time, which is called Double Low problem in this paper. It is to be noted that even a fingerprint system with very low equal error rate can not achieve such a Double Low goal. It is difficult to solve Double Low problem only by improving the performance of a certain individual fingerprint identification algorithm, and the fusion of various fingerprint identification algorithms becomes a promising way. In this paper, a hybrid fusion method of fingerprint identification is proposed to solve Double Low problem. Firstly, minutiae-based and ridge-based matching algorithms are used orderly, which is a kind of serial fusion strategy. Secondly, a rank-level fusion is used, which is a kind of parallel fusion strategy. Experiment results on FVC2002DB1 and FVC2002DB2 indicate that only 6.6% fingerprints are falsely rejected on the average under zero false accept rate with our method, while 14.8%, 9.4% fingerprints are falsely rejected under zero false accept rate with the serial fusion strategy and the parallel fusion strategy, respectively.