NARASUS SARATHY INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY OMALUR, SALEM.

TITLE OF PAPER: TOUCHLESS FINGERPRINT SENSOR IN BIOMETRICS Authors: Vasanthakumar.c Email id: vasanthakumarnsit@gmail.com Phno: 9629920630

Soorianarayanan.B Email id: jeiguru@gmail.com Phno: 770883444

Abstract:
Fingerprint image acquisition is considered the most critical step of an automated fingerprint authentication system, as it determines the final fingerprint image quality, which has drastic effects on the overall biometric system performance. When a finger touches or rolls onto a sensor surface, the elastic skin deforms. The quantity and direction of the pressure applied by the user, the skin conditions, and the projection of an irregular 3D object (the finger) onto a 2D flat plane (sensor platen) introduce distortions, noise, and inconsistencies on the captured fingerprint image. These problems have been indicated as inconsistent, irreproducible, and non-uniform contacts and, during each acquisition, their effect on the same fingerprint is different and uncontrollable. Hence, the representation of the same fingerprint changes every time the finger is placed on the sensor platen, increasing the complexity of fingerprint matching and representing a negative influence on system performance with a consequent limited spread of this biometric technology. To overcome the above problems we are going for touchless or contactless fingerprinting. Because of the lack of contact between the finger and any rigid surface, the skin does not deform during the capture and the repeatability of the measure is ensured. Capturing techniques using more than one camera or combining cameras and mirrors, referred to as 3D touchless fingerprinting, are here presented together with a new three dimensional representation of fingerprints and minutiae. In order to improve the accuracy of fingerprint identification or verification systems we proposed to use more than one camera or more than one view. These devices combine touchless technology with a multivision system. In this paper we are going to discuss about the touchless fingerprinting technology using more number of cameras.

1. Introduction:
The common procedure to capture a fingerprint requires that users either place or roll the finger on the platen of a livescan device or apply ink on the finger and then, place or roll it on a paper. In both cases, users have to apply a certain quantity of pressure to ensure that the ridges adhere completely to the capture surface. Under this pressure, the elastic skin of the finger deforms and the acquired fingerprint image is distorted and inconsistent. Due to the impossibility to control the quantity and the direction of this pressure, a different impression of the same fingerprint is generated during each acquisition, making the matching more complicated and reducing the overall performance of the

automated fingerprint system. During capture with a livescan device, dirt, sweat, and moisture commonly present on the finger skin are transferred onto the glass platen in correspondence with each ridge. Thus, a latent print remains impressed on the glass surface. Using special mechanical and/or chemical tools, it is possible to copy the residual fingerprint and create a latex (or gelatin) replica of it that can be used to try to grant access to the system, increasing its vulnerability especially for unattended or

unsupervised fingerprint systems. Over the years, there has been a continuous improvement of matching performance, but capture technology still represents a strong limitation for widespread use of this biometric modality. Image acquisition is

considered the most critical step of an automated

fingerprint

identification

system (AFIS)

as it

Inconsistent contact: The most problematic of these projections appears to be elastic distortions of the friction skin of the finger which displaces different portions of the finger(ever so slightly) by different magnitudes and in different directions. Irreproducible contact: The ridge structure is continuously modified by manual work, accidents, and injuries to the finger. These changes are sometimes permanent or semi-permanent.

determines the fingerprint image quality, which has drastic effects on system performance. Recently, new fingerprint devices have been proposed. They have been designed to overcome the above limitations of the legacy technology. Among the different proposed technologies, touchless fingerprinting represents a very interesting solution to skin deformation and latent print problems. Moreover, touchless technology tries to reduce other problems experienced with legacy imaging devices: Slippage and smearing due to moist fingers Improper contact due to finger dryness Dirt accumulating on the imaging surface Degraded image quality resulting from wear and tear on surface coatings Halo effect generated by the temperature difference between the finger and the platen.

Furthermore, each impression of a finger may possibly depict a different portion of its surface. This may introduce additional spurious fingerprint

features. Latent print: Each time a user places the finger on the sensor platen, a latent fingerprint is left on it, due to oils, moisture, sweat, or other substances present on the surface of the finger skin. This represents a lack of security for the whole system, because the device retains a persons latent fingerprint that can be used to grant an impostor access. Also, when a new user places her or his finger on the platen, it can

2. Intrinsic Problems of Contact-Based over Touchless:

Contact-based fingerprint imaging (CFI) sensors have been improved overtime to create a solid basis of of positive ones identification However, and/or CFI verification identity.

happen that the device captures the new fingerprint and portion of the previous latent, generating a wrong template for the current user. The ridges are mashed when more pressure is applied, resulting in a blurred blotch that cannot be processed by fingerprint-matching software. This blotching effect can also be caused when the surface of the finger is too wet. Likewise, ridge continuity is lost when less pressure is applied. This also happens when the surface of the finger is too dry. When the finger is placed against a flat imaging surface, the skin is stretched and compressed in myriad amounts and angles in order to map the three-dimensional surface to a two-dimensional plane.

incorporates some key problems that can lead to false matching or false non-matching. In highlight the problems intrinsic to the CFI technology. Non-uniform contact: The dryness of the skin, shallow/worn-out ridges(due to aging/genetics), skin disease, sweat, dirt, and humidity in the air all confound the situation resulting in a non-ideal contact status.

The approaches to capture a fingerprint based on touchless technology can be grouped in two main families: Reflection-based Touchless Finger Imaging (RTFI) and Transmission-based Touchless Finger Imaging (TTFI).

4.
(a) This represents a mechanical or physical mapping and it means that ridges can change their intrinsic shape, direction, and continuity. This is especially true during the capture of a rolled fingerprint or if the finger is wrongly twisted while remaining in contact with the imaging surface (Figure a). The above picture highlights an example of a latent fingerprint left on the platen of a CFI optical device. This latent was imaged by simply shining ambient sunlight coming from the window onto the imaging plane using a small mirror. The software automatically detected and grabbed the image. The image was used to attack the system. A match was found and the system granted access. A small flashlight was also tested and produced the same results. The same fingerprint imaged using varying deposition pressure. Rotational distortion experienced with legacy images. based

Reflection-Based Touchless Finger

Imaging:
The basic capture principle of the reflectiontouchless finger imaging approach is

highlighted in Figure (b).

(b) To obtain an image with sufficient contrast to well distinguish between ridges and valleys, it is necessary that: The finger skin absorbs only a small portion of the incident light, and the majority of it (albedo) is reflected back to the detector. The quantity of light absorbed by the valleys is different from the quantity absorbed by the ridges. Detectors, illuminators, and lenses must be designed so that the contrast of the ridgevalley pattern is sufficiently high to allow the extraction of the important features for fingerprint matching. Parameters such as the depth of focus (DOF) and

3. Touchless Finger Imaging:

Touchless or contactless finger imaging is essentially a remote-sensing technology used for the capture of the ridgevalley pattern with no contact between the skin of the finger and the sensing area. The lack of contact drastically reduces the abovementioned problems intrinsic to CFI technology.

field of view (FOV) of the camera, the irradiation power, the frequency of the light sources, and the shutter speed of the detectors must be correctly chosen during the design of the device to obtain the optimal contrast and facilitate the acquisition of fingerprints with a very dry or a very wet skin, which are usually very difficult to capture by the use of a

structure in the opposite direction with respect to the direction from which the light rays come. The wavelength, the intensity, the position, and the incident angle of the light are very important parameters to obtain the optimal contrast and the correct representation of the fingerprint.

(d) touch-based device (see Figure c). Long wavelength rays including infrared tend to penetrate the skin, to be absorbed by the epidermis, and the ridgevalley pattern results in less (c) Observing the two images, one can clarity The ratio of hemoglobin absorption is lower around 500 nm and higher around 545 nm and 575 nm. Because it is desirable to observe only the surface of the finger and reduce the effects of hemoglobin in order to obtain a high-contrast fingerprint image, the wavelength at lower

immediately notice that the contactless image provides a negative-polarity representation of the fingerprint (i.e., valleys appear to be darker than ridges). Light sources should be placed as close as possible to the detector, so that the light rays are as much as possible perpendicular to the finger skin and the majority of the light is reflected back to the sensor chip. This reduces the shadowing effect caused by the 3D ridgevalley structure. If the light sources are placed far away from the normal to the finger surface, each ridge generates a shadow that is projected onto the neighbor ridge, modifying the apparent profile of the intermediate valley (Figure d). Hence, when ridges are then extracted using legacycommercial fingerprint algorithms, a set of pixels representing the valleys belongs in reality to the adjacent ridge. The overall effect is a small shift (it can be up to a ridge width) of the whole ridgevalley

hemoglobin absorption must be chosen for the light source of a touchless fingerprint sensor. Moreover, a common CCD or CMOS detector has high sensitivity still around 500 nm. Considering the skin reflectance of the finger and the spectral sensitiveness of each camera, the final wavelength of the light for a touchless fingerprint device can be determined. The reason to employ blue light is that blue is complementary to yellow and red, which are the dominant colors of finger skin. The advantage of the touchless approach with respect to the traditional Frustrated Total Internal Reflection

(FTIR) one is that the ridgevalley pattern is fully imaged. To avoid blurring effects on the final image, detector arrays with a global shutter (all the pixels must be powered at the same instant of time) and a sufficient shutter speed are needed. The camera lenses must be designed with special characteristics too. Because the distance between the camera and each small portion of the fingerprint is not constant due to finger curvature and because the finger cannot always be placed exactly in the same position, the DOF and the FOV of the camera must be large enough to allow the user to place the finger with a certain degree of freedom and ensure that the fingerprint is always in focus along the entire surface.

This time, the light sources are placed in such a way that they illuminate the nail side (see Figure (e). Red light with a wavelength of = 660 nm is used, because it has high transmittance ratio to the skin tissue. Hence, light penetrating the finger is collected by the detector placed in front of the fingerprint. When the light wavelength is more than 660 nm, capillary vessels are strongly visible in fingerprint images, because of the high absorption ratio to the hemoglobin of the blood. On the contrary, when the light wavelength is less than 660 nm, the brightness is insufficient to acquire images because of the high absorption ratio of the skin tissues. It is possible to capture interior information of the finger that can be used to reduce the negative effects of the skin conditions on the final image, as happens in contactbased technology.

5. Transmission-Based Touchless Finger Imaging: 6. 3D Touchless Fingerprinting:

Detecting the optical characteristics of this internal layer enables the detection of the same pattern as that of the fingerprint without being affected by the status of the finger surface. Touchless fingerprint devices are already available on the market, but they did not generate

sufficient interest to allow widespread use, in spite of their advantages with respect to legacy devices. The main reason has to be found in the relatively higher costs of these sensors compared to the flat touchbased ones New touchless devices using more than one camera or more than one view have been recently proposed. These devices combine touchless technology with a multivision system. In such a way, it is possible to: Acquire rolled-equivalent fingerprints with a lower (e) failure-to-acquire error and a faster capture procedure than traditional methods

 Obtain the 3D representation of a finger and the ridge-valley fingerprint structure.

then, the rolled-equivalent fingerprint. The 3D reconstruction procedure is based on stereo-vision and photo-grammetry algorithms. The exact position and orientation of each camera (camera calibration) with respect to a given reference system are computed offline, using a 3D target on which points with known positions are marked. The position of the middle camera (camera 3 in Figure (f)) has been chosen so that it could capture the central portion of the fingerprint, where the core and the delta are usually located. Then, the other cameras have been placed so that their fields of view partially overlap. In this way, the images contain a common set of pixels

(f) The device is a cluster of five cameras located on a semicircle and pointing to its center, where the finger has to be placed during capture.

(homologous pixels) representing the same portion of the skin. To compute the position of each pixel in the 3D space (3D reconstruction), the correspondences between two image pixels must be solved (image matching). This is done computing the crosscorrelation between each adjacent image pair. Before The device contains a set of green LED that, the distortions generated by the mapping of a 3D object (the finger) onto the 2D image plane have to be minimized. The first proposed approach required the use of a beveled ring mirror. The user has to introduce the finger into the ring from its narrower side. The capture takes place while the finger moves into the ring. During the movement, the camera placed in front of the fingertip captures a sequence of circular slices containing the projections of overlapped portions of the fingerprint. Using a log-polar transformation, the circular slices are mapped to rectangular processing. ones to facilitate further image

arrays also located on the semicircle. According to TBS, green light provides the best contrast for the fingerprint structure with respect to red and blue light, but no reasons for this choice are reported in the literature. The intensity of each LED array can be individually controlled during each acquisition. Moreover, the finger has to be placed in correct position so that it is completely contained in the fields of view of the five cameras at the same time. A real-time algorithm helps the user during finger placement. Once the finger is in the correct position, the user receives a Dont move request from the device and the capture starts automatically. During an acquisition, each LED array is set to a specific light intensity and the five cameras synchronously capture a picture of the finger. The acquired five views are then combined to obtain a 3D reconstruction and

The device is equipped with a livescan camera and two flat mirrors to obtain three overlapping views of each finger. The mirrors and the sensor move along the longitudinal finger size to scan the whole fingerprint. To compose the three views and obtain the entire fingerprint, two line patterns are projected onto the finger. The three views are composed in the 3D space, knowing the position of the light pattern, obtained by a calibration procedure. (h) The rectangular slices are then combined using correlation to obtain the reconstructed rolledequivalent fingerprint. Before the correlation, each slice must be corrected to reduce the distortions caused by the variation of the finger position within the ring during capture. In fact, if the finger comes closer to the mirror, the ridgevalley pattern is narrower than when the finger moves away from it. The correction can be done using the position of the fingertip captured by the camera or measuring the position of the finger within the ring by the use of an additional position sensor. The difficulty of the ringmirror approach is represented by the inconstant speed v of the finger. Structured light is the projection of a light pattern (plane, grid, or more complex shape) at a known angle onto an object. This technique can be very useful for imaging and acquiring dimensional information. The most often-used light pattern is generated by fanning out a light beam into a sheet of light. When a sheet of light intersects with an object, a bright line of light can be seen on the surface of the object. By viewing this line of light from an angle, the observed distortions in the line can be translated into height variations. Scanning the object with the light constructs 3D information about the shape of the object. This is the basic principle behind depth perception for machines, or 3D machine vision. In order to achieve significant improvements on the manner in which fingerprint images are currently acquired, commodity digital cameras to acquire the fingerprint scan of all five fingers simultaneously In fact, because the user cannot control the speed of her or his finger during the acquisition, the camera must have a shutter speed high enough also to capture small movements of the finger. Unfortunately, the relatively high costs of the ring mirror, which must be manufactured with special techniques to obtain a very flat surface, made the development of a ten-printer device based on this approach impossible. without physical contact between the sensor and the finger. The scan process takes only 200 ms.

7. Vulnerability of Touchless Devices:

As is any other authentication technique, fingerprint recognition is not totally spoof-proof. Touchless fingerprint technology is not free from this problem. Indeed, the capture principle simplifies the method of and the tools for the attack. Whereas for

contact-based sensors a fingerprint must be replicated preserving the 3D ridgevalley structure by the use of special materials (gelatin, silicon, or latex), in the case of the touchless approach, a 2D picture or a simple drawing of a fingerprint on a matte paper presented in front of the sensor camera is sufficient to attack the system and grant access. A fake fingerprint can be easily obtained printing a ridge pattern on a matte colored paper. Then, the paper can be folded onto any finger and presented to the device. To increase the absorption of the light and simulate more precisely the skin reflection properties, it is sufficient to use a paper with the same color of the illuminating light. This ensures obtaining a final image very similar to the image obtained from a real finger. The experiment was repeated for 20 fingerprints and the match was always positive. To try to overcome this problem, new methods of protection must be investigated. The method takes advantage of the sweating activity of the human body. Sweat drops come out periodically from the skin pores to maintain a constant body temperature. This activity is continuous, always present, and the frequency of the emission of the drops varies with the variation of the difference between the body and environmental magnification temperatures. lenses and Using high-

processed to extract the sweat pores using wavelets (top hat wavelets) and traditional motion tracking techniques (optical-flow) were used to follow the presence/absence of sweat coming out of the pores present on the fingerprint friction ridges. The main concern for this liveness detection approach is the high cost of the lenses, the camera, and the illuminators used to achieve useful results. The implementation of this method would only be feasible for high-security applications where the loss and the danger generated by a false access would be tremendous.

8. Conclusion:
A new technology for the acquisition of fingerprints without any contact between the finger and the sensing area has been presented here. Touchless technology represents a valid alternative to current capture methods. The advantages of this new approach have been presented. However, a new method for image quality check, analysis

enhancement, protection, and representation must still be implemented to provide additional flexibility for specific applications. Touchless Finger Imaging (TFI) offers the following advantages over CFI. Accurate imaging: TFI captures all the features of the finger surface. Not only are the ridges imaged, but also the valleys. This is very important for forensic applications. Consistency/repeatability: An important attribute for accurate matching is the consistency of

special

illumination

techniques, it is possible to capture by the use of a remote camera the perspiration activity of the pores present on the friction ridges. The presence of this activity ensures the liveness of the finger and protects against a fake fingerprint attack as described above. The frame rate and the shutter speed of the camera were fixed to 30 frame/s and 1/250 ms, respectively. The acquired sweating-pores video

information between images, and the ability to accurately capture that information every time the finger is imaged. Every time a finger is placed for

sequences were then down sampled to 1 frame/s to reduce computational load. Each frame was

TFI, the information on the finger does not change, distort, hide, move, and so on. A finger is imaged and the information is consistently acquired. Larger information content: In the case of the 3D touchless devices, more surface area and minutiae points are collected. Due to the lack of deformation, the relative minutiae types and locations do not change. This should result in improved matching accuracy and confidence level. User acceptance: Without the presence of latent prints, users can be more confident about their personal privacy. With the absence of sharing body oils, dirt, grime, viruses, bacteria, and the like, users can be assured about their personal safety and hygiene.

9. References:
www.biometrics-today.com www.findarticles.com www.wikipedia.org www.searchsecurity.techtarget.com