Looking into the effects of minutia quality on matching sub-templates

Modern automated fingerprint identification systems use minutia templates for matching, during which the coordinates and orientations of minutiae obtained through feature extraction are utilized to generate a score. The feature extraction stage also assigns each minutia a quality score to indicate the image quality at the position of the minutia. Even though the quality score of a minutia is not used in matching, it can affect the matching score significantly. In this paper, we investigate the effects of minutia quality on matching a template against its sub-templates. Specifically, we study the effects of minutia quality on constructing sub-templates and the effects of randomized quality modifications on matching. Experimental results are reported.