Image and Vision Computing 23 (2005) 491500 www.elsevier.

com/locate/imavis

An adaptive hybrid energy-based ngerprint matching technique

Khaled Ahmed Nagaty*
Faculty of Computers and Information Sciences, Ain-Shams University, Cairo, Egypt Received 8 September 2003; received in revised form 29 July 2004; accepted 1 December 2004

Abstract In this paper we present a new adaptive hybrid energy-based ngerprint matching system, which combines both minutiae information available in a ngerprint with the information of the local ridges in their vicinity. A more continuous representation of ngerprints can be obtained by using an energy-based rectangular tessellation with non-overlapped squared cells. However, a xed tessellation is not efcient in handling non-linear deformations in ngerprints for which we propose an adaptive matching technique that uses dynamic rectangular tessellation to handle them. Each time a match is not found the dynamic tessellation increases its cell size until there is a match or cell size is greater than image size where the ngerprint is rejected. The basic idea of this system is to divide the ngerprint-matching problem into several small sub-problems that involve the use of cell energy minimization for which an iterative schema is devised. At each minimization step this schema optimizes its local energy according to the previous estimate and the observed image features. Minutiae and local ridges in their vicinity, produce different amounts of energy which form the energy vectors of the ngerprint image. In this work, we focus on the difcult problem of recognizing known ngerprints while rejecting unknown ones. Our system was tested on FVC2000 benchmark database of ngerprints and showed promising results. We show that matching performance can be improved by using energy vectors and adaptive matching, where adaptive matching reduces the effect of intra-class variations between different impressions of the same ngerprint image and energy vectors can efciently represent ngerprints by using both information extracted from the minutiae and their local surrounding ridges. q 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Fingerprints; Minutiae Matching; Proportion Ranks; Adaptive Matching; Energy Minimization

1. Introduction Fingerprint is the pattern of ridges and valleys on the surface of the nger [1]. Fingerprints matching is an important technique for personal identication, the main reason for this is that every person is believed to have distinct ngerprints [2]. Presently, several organizations are using ngerprints for not only criminal investigation but also to access control of restricted areas, border control, driving license applicants, liquor licenses, identication cards, smart cards, cellular phones, teller machines, verication of rearm purchasers, passports and visas. Fingerprints are one of the most popular biometrics techniques in both of verication and identication modes. In the verication mode, automatic ngerprints identication systems (AFIS) either accepts or rejects an
* Tel.: C20 2 262 6146; fax: C20 2 345 4711. E-mail address: knagaty@asunet.shams.edu.eg. 0262-8856/$ - see front matter q 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.imavis.2004.12.001

individual identity. In the identication mode, AFIS recognizes an individual without a claimed identity. Its criminal applications include verifying the alleged identity of suspects, identifying known criminals, persons considered as potential criminals and detained suspects [3]. The manual matching of ngerprints is a very tedious task because of the size of the image database, which can vary from a few hundred to several million records. Despite the ingenious methods improvised to increase the efciency of the manual approach to ngerprint indexing and search, the ever growing demands on manual ngerprint recognition quickly became overwhelming [4]. This problem can be easily overcome by automating the ngerprint matching process. Its goal is to quickly and accurately determine whether a query ngerprint is present in the database and to retrieve those, which are most similar to the query from the database. If two ngerprints are from the same nger, then their minutiae must match each other topologically. Minutiae are particular types of local discontinuities in

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Fig. 1. Prominent minutiae.

the ngerprint pattern. A closer look at a ngerprint reveals that the ridge or valleys exhibit anomalies of various kinds such as bifurcations, ridge endings, short ridges and crossovers [5]. The most prominent minutiae, which are used by the commercially available ngerprint identication systems, are ridge endings and bifurcation points. Fig. 1, shows examples of bifurcation and ridge ending minutiae. In this system, we adopt two-class minutiae: ridge endings and bifurcations. To perform minutiae matching we have to register the minutiae located in a ngerprint, where the features or components of each minutia must be extracted. These features are its membership class, orientation and location in the ngerprint. The registration process must consider also the relation of a minutia with its nearest neighbors and their relative distances.

matching we can reduce the variations between different impressions of the same nger which may be due to displacement, rotation and partial prints, where the dynamic tessellation in the adaptive matching algorithm increases its cell size whenever a match is not found until cell size is equal to image size. At that time the matching algorithm becomes completely invariant to rotation, displacement and partial cancellation.

3. Motivation of the work In this paper, we propose an energy-based matching technique for ngerprints which uses energy residuals to represent ngerprints. The energy residual of a cell in the dynamic tessellation contains information about minutiae types, orientations and relative distances between minutiae in that cell. It also contains the information extracted from the local ridges in the vicinity of minutiae while adaptive matching reduces the effects of non-linear deformations found in ngerprint images. Most conventional methods do not use the information extracted from both the minutiae and local ridges in their vicinity or use adaptive matching to reduce variation effects between different impressions of the same ngerprint. Our approach does not depend on minutiae pairing or graph matching methods to nd the closest ngerprint in the database which makes our approach easier and faster than most of conventional approaches as they are considered computationally expensive. Jain et al. in Ref. [19] do not handle non-linear deformations; instead, they use compact solid-state sensors to reduce the contact area to z0.6!0.6 for the ngertip and therefore sense only a limited portion of the ngertip. Images acquired using these sensors loose a signicant amount of information because the number of minutiae points that can be extracted from the ngerprint samples is smaller compared to that acquired using conventional optical sensors. Also, by using solid-sensors a signicant amount of ridges information is lost which makes the images acquired by using these sensors are unsuitable for classication. As compact solid-state sensors are not widely spread compared to conventional optical sensors, this makes the approach in Ref. [19] is very limited to the images acquired using these types of sensors. Our proposed approach is not limited to special types of sensors, so we get use of all the information available in the ngerprint and at the same time reduces the non-linear deformations effects, thus increasing the matching performance and it is also considered a fast ngerprint image retrieval approach. Our proposed matching technique is supposed to work well because the cells in a rectangular tessellation act as tolerance boxes which consider the relations and relative distances between minutiae, while minutiae proportion ranks take into consideration the minutiae orientations and types. The orientations of minutiae and their relationships are the main parameters a human expert depends on to

2. Related work A variety of ngerprints matching techniques have been proposed. Minutiae-based ngerprint matching systems in Ref. [6,7] rstly locate the minutiae points in both the unknown ngerprint and the stored template, then they match their relative positions. Point-pattern based matching systems in Ref. [810], and graph-based matching systems in Ref. [1116] are greatly inuenced by the interference of noise and distortions in image. These matching systems are more complicated, besides they need a tremendous time, which makes them computationally expensive. Matching systems based on energy minimization in Ref. [17], use only constellations of minutiae to represent a ngerprint. They do not use the information extracted from the ridges in their vicinity, which causes a great loss of information that can have a signicant effect on the matching accuracy. Matching systems using the combination between global and local details in Ref. [18] depend on the detection of a reference point, the core point, which may be falsely detected or lost due to noise. Hybrid minutiae-based matching systems in Ref. [19] use the combination between minutiae and the ridges in their vicinity. However, they do not handle non-linear deformations, where the skin can be deformed in a more or less elastic manner, which limits the matching performance of these systems. The main contribution of our work is in using energy vectors and adaptive matching in ngerprint matching, where the compact size of energy vectors facilitate the matching process rather than conventional methods using graphs or point matching which may be high computational tasks. By using adaptive

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Fig. 2. The adaptive hybrid energy-based matching system.

perform ngerprints matching. Choosing small values for minutiae proportion ranks reduce the effects of false minutiae which may result from noise. In case of ngerprints deformation such as minutiae displacements due to skin elasticity or in case of partial cancellations our technique uses different tessellations with different cell sizes to reduce these effects. The algorithm starts with small cell sizes and uses larger cell sizes each time a match is not found until cell size is equal to image size, this increases the size of tolerance boxes to reduce the problems of minutiae displacement, rotation and partial cancellation which provides a better chance for a match to be found. Fig. 2 shows a block diagram of the proposed system. This paper is organized as follows: Section 4 describes the preprocessing operations required by our technique. Section 5 describes the adaptive hybrid energy-based matching algorithm. Section 6 describes the experimental study and their results. Section 7 is dedicated for conclusions.

4. Image preprocessing This system deals with ngerprint images stored as arrays of gray levels and obtained with a scanner or camera device either from an inked ngerprint on paper, or as a live scan directly from the nger. The enhancement and segmentation of a ngerprint image are done using the algorithms in Ref. [7] while binarization is done using the algorithm in Ref. [20].

image, each one followed in turn. The levels of this tessellation are lexicographically indexed by the set IZ{1,2,.n} where n is the number of levels. These rectangular levels are partitioned into a set of nonoverlapped equal-sized cells that are indexed by their ordinates row and column (i, j), respectively. Each cell contains energy, so we call it an energy cell, where energy is the sum of squares of the pixels amplitudes. Each energy cell has two types of input features, each type is represented with m inputs. It also has two outputs which are the residual energy of the two types of inputs, and a minimization process for the energy. After image normalization, a cell energy signies a scalar quantity which does not depend on the input features to that cell. By using their proportion ranks, each type of input features minimizes the cell energy from its initial value E(0)(i,j) to its nal value E(m)(i,j) after m processing steps. The cell output energy of a specic type of features is its nal value which is less than its initial value by the amount of energy gained by these features. We call this energy as energy residual. The minimization process is explained in details in Section 5.5. Fig. 3 shows an energy cell with its inputs are the minutiae proportion ranks W1,W2,.Wm, that correspond to m minutiae, and the direction proportion ranks D1,D2,.Dm, that correspond to the main direction of the local ridges in the vicinity of these minutiae and E(0)(i,j) being the initial energy of cell (i, j) at m step zero. Its outputs are the energy residuals EM i; j and m ED i; j, which are the energy residuals after m steps required for processing m minutiae and for processing the local ridges in the vicinity of these minutiae, respectively. We notice that each energy cell is a non-linear model in the sense that its output is a non-linear combination of its inputs.

5. The adaptive hybrid energy-based matching technique The matching technique described here is called adaptive because it uses dynamic rectangular tessellation to handle non-linear deformations in the ngerprints where cell size increases as a match is not found. It is called hybrid because it combines both the information extracted from the minutiae and their local ridges in their vicinity. The energy-based rectangular tessellation is composed of n rectangular consecutive levels that lain across the

Fig. 3. An energy cell.

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Fig. 4. A tessellation of cell size 64!64.

Fig. 4 shows a 512!512 ngerprint image with a tessellation of cell size 64!64 superimposed onto it. The following sections describe the constituents of our proposed matching technique. 5.1. Minutiae proportion ranks Minutiae are the ridge characteristics, the most important of which are the bifurcations and ridge endings. A set of these points constitutes the features set that characterize a ngerprint image. Detection of a minutia in the ngerprint is important for determining its type. Automatic minutia detection is an important task for a matching algorithm. Minutia detection is a trivial task when an ideal thinned image is obtained. Given a thinned image our approach uses the well-known idea of the crossing number proposed in Ref. [7]. However, a large number of false minutiae can be detected and their elimination is necessary. Our approach uses the idea presented in Ref. [21], where several spurious minutiae are deleted and the surviving minutiae are the true minutiae. The orientation of a bifurcation or a ridge ending can be obtained by using the formula presented in Ref. [20]. The orientation set of minutiae is formed by using the set of angles: Q Z f08; 22:58; 458; 67:58; 908; 112:58; 1358; 157:58; 1808; 202:58; 2258; 247:58; 2708; 292:58; 3158; 337:58g in step of 22.58. Then the orientation of a minutia can take one of the angles in the ordered set Q. As the registration of a minutia is done by recording its type, orientation and relation with its neighbors, we can use the concept of proportion ranks to identify both minutiae types and their orientations. The main difference between the concept of minutiae scores presented in Ref. [22] and that of minutiae proportion ranks is that the former concept evaluates the degree of relevance of a minutia to its original one and accordingly it is given more importance than a less relevant

minutia in minutiae matching. This means that minutiae of same type and orientation can take different scores with different images depending on image quality. The concept of minutiae proportion ranks does not discuss the relevance of a minutia to its original one or its importance in the matching process, because all true minutiae have the same importance as they appear. However, minutiae proportion ranks are just used to identify minutiae with different types and orientations and do not imply the priority or importance of a minutia with specic orientation over another or the sensitivity of a minutia to a specic orientation than another. This means that a minutia with a specic type and orientation must have the same proportion rank with different images. To compute minutiae proportion ranks we rst nd minutiae ranks, where we use the ordered minutiae orientations in set Q and starting with ridge endings (RE) and then bifurcations (BIF) we consider the order of a minutia at a specic orientation to be its rank. The rational behind using the orientation order as a rank is that orientation is important to differentiate between minutiae of the same type and it is also an important feature in minutiae matching. Table 1 shows minutiae types which are RE, BIF, angles of set Q and minutiae ranks. Now, by using minutiae ranks we can compute the proportion rank of each minutia which determines its contribution to the matching process. To compute the proportion rank (MR) of an oriented minutia R, which may be either a bifurcation or ridge ending we use the following formula: MR Z Rq8 xC TR TR Z X
q82Q

Rq8

(1)

where Rq8 is the rank of a minutia with specic orientation q8, while TR is the sum of all minutiae ranks at different orientations in Table 1. We compute TR as follows: (1) Starting with RE and then BIF, we sort these minutiae in an ascending order of their orientations as in Table 1. (2) The rank of a minutia at a specic orientation is the order of its corresponding angle q8 in Table 1. (3) TR is the sum of all minutiae ranks in Table 1, i.e. TRZ528. We compute Rq8 as follows: (1) Detect the type of a specic minutia. (2) Compute the orientation q8 of that minutia. (3) Use minutia type and orientation q8 to nd minutia rank Rq8 from Table 1. For example, suppose that we have a bifurcation with q8Z458, then by using Table 1 we look for type (BIF) at q8Z458, we nd that the rank of this bifurcation is 19. By using formula (1), we nd that the proportion rank of a bifurcation at 458 is 0.13 taking the scaling factor C to be 3.5.

K.A. Nagaty / Image and Vision Computing 23 (2005) 491500 Table 1 Minutiae ranks Type q8 Rq8 Type q8 Rq8 Type q8 Rq8 Type q8 Rq8 RE 08 1 RE 202.58 10 BIF 458 19 BIF 247.58 28 RE 22.58 2 RE 2258 11 BIF 67.58 20 RE 458 3 RE 247.58 12 BIF 908 21 BIF 2708 29 RE 67.58 4 RE 2708 13 BIF 112.58 22 RE 908 5 RE 292.58 14 BIF 1358 23 BIF 292.58 30 RE 112.58 6 RE 3158 15 BIF 157.58 24 BIF 3158 31 RE 1358 7 RE 337.58 16 BIF 1808 25 RE 157.58 8 BIF 08 17 BIF 202.58 26 BIF 337.58 32 RE 1808 9 BIF 22.58 18 BIF 2258 27

495

5.2. Direction proportion ranks A block of 48!48 is taken around each minutia within each cell in the rectangular tessellation. The main characteristic of a block of local ridges is their main direction. Different directions will result in different effects on the matching process. The main direction can be computed by using the gradient method presented in Ref. [7]. The direction set of the local ridges is formed by using the set of angles fZ{0, 22.5, 45, 67.5, 90, 112.5, 135 and 157.58} in step of 22.58, as we do not distinguish between head and tail directions. Then the direction of a block of local ridges in the vicinity of a minutia can take one of the angles in the ordered set f. Fig. 5, shows 512!512 image with a window of 48!48 around each minutia. As with minutiae, we sort the block directions in order of their orientations, then we consider the order of a ridge block direction to be its rank. Table 2 shows block directions in an ascending order and their direction ranks.

Direction ranks are just used to identify blocks with different directions and do not mean the priority of a direction over another, but it is used to distinguish between directions of different ridge blocks. To compute the direction proportion rank Dd of a block of local ridges d we use the following formula: Dd Z Dq8 xC Td Td Z X
q824

Dq8

(2)

where Dq8 is the rank of a block of local ridges at specic orientation q8, while Td is the sum of all ranks of ridge blocks with different orientations in Table 2 and C is chosen to be 1. The same procedure used to compute Rq8 and TR is used also to compute Dq8 and Td. In general, the scaling factor C is directly proportion to the sum of ranks where the value of C increases as the sum of ranks increases and vice versa. The scaling factor C controls energy decay by controlling the amount of energy gained by a minutia or a block of local ridges. If C is large then the proportion ranks are also large and accordingly the energy gained by a minutia or a block of ridges increases while their residual energy decreases and vice versa. Also, C is chosen so that the values of minutiae proportion ranks are small to reduce the effects of false minutiae if still present. So, C can be chosen empirically. 5.3. Image alignment Each squared cell can accommodate one minutia or more. The alignment of an input minutia with a cell is done by using the following rule: a minutia is assigned to a cell, if the distance between a minutia and a cell is the smallest
Table 2 Direction ranks q8 Dq8 08 1 22.58 2 458 3 67.58 4 908 5 112.58 6 1358 7 157.58 8

Fig. 5. A window of 48!48 around each minutia.

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where E(0)(i,j) is the initial energy of the cell (i, j) and G(iCz, jCJ) is the normalized gray level of pixel (iCz, jCJ). Normalization is a pixel-wise operation it does not change the clarity of the ridges and valley structures. A normalized pixel is dened as a pixel with a pre-specied gray value of mean and variance. Normalization of a pixels gray value, eliminates or reduces the variations between ngerprint images, which increase the matching performance. Normalization of ngerprint images is presented and illustrated in Ref. [23]. 5.5. Energy minimization An important characteristic of the energy function is its usual decomposition as a sum of simple interaction potentials, which depend just on a few variables and parameters. By using the cell energy decomposition into its local terms, we get the following iterative equation (see Appendix I for equation derivation): Et i; j Z EtK1 i; j K ut i; j !EtK1 i; j (4) c t Z 1; 2; .m where E(t)(i,j) is the amount of energy remained in the cell (i,j) after processing step t, m is the total number of minutiae in the cell (i,j) and u(t)(i,j) is the proportion rank of the minutia at step t. After processing all the minutiae at tZm, we obtain the residual energy of the cell (i,j) with respect to m minutiae, which is EM i; j. The same minimization process is done for the blocks of local ridges surrounding the m minutiae by using the same initial energy E(0)(i,j) and the direction proportion ranks of these blocks. After m m processing steps we get the residual energy ED i; j of the cell (i,j) with respect to the local ridges. As an example for energy minimization, suppose that an energy cell contains three bifurcations of orientations 458, 1358 and 2258 and the orientation of the local ridges around the rst bifurcation is 458 and that of the second bifurcation is 112.58 while that of the third bifurcation is 1358. We assume that the initial cell energy E(0)Z100. By using Table 1 and formula (1) we nd that the proportion rank of the bifurcation with orientation 458 is 0.13, the proportion rank of the bifurcation with orientation 1358 is 0.15 while the proportion rank of the bifurcation 2258 is 0.18. We then compute the residual m energy with respect to minutiae EM i; jfor that cell as follows:
0 EM Z 100 1 EM Z 100 K 0:15 !100 Z 85

Fig. 6. Input minutiae alignment. (a) Minutia with equal distances with is neighboring horizontal cells. (b) Minutia with equal distances with is neighboring vertical cells. (c) Minutia with equal distances with is neighboring four cells.

distance. If any minutia is on the border of its neighboring cells, then we can use the following rules: 1. Assign a minutia to the left cell if the distance between this minutia and its neighboring horizontal cells are equal. See Fig. 6(a). 2. Assign a minutia to the cell in the upper level if the distance between a minutia and its neighboring vertical cells are equal. See Fig. 6(b). 3. Assign a minutia to the upper left cell if the distance between a minutia and its four neighboring cells are equal. See Fig. 6(c). 5.4. Initialization In general, the energy of an image is the sum of squares of the pixels amplitudes which are in our work the gray values of these pixels. We use the sum of squares of the gray values of the image as the initial energy. For a square cell of size b!b, we compute the following amount of initial energy: E0 i; j Z
b b XX zZ1 JZ1

2 EM Z 85 K 0:13 !85 Z 73:9 3 EM Z 73:9 K 0:18 !73:9 Z 60:6

G2 i C z; j C J

(3)

where the minutiae can be picked up in any order. By using Table 2 and formula (2) the proportion rank of the local ridges at 45 is 0.08, and that at orientation 112.5 is

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0.17 while that at orientation of 135 is 0.19. The residual m energy with respect to local ridges ED i; j can be computed as follows:
0 ED Z 100 1 ED Z 100 K 0:08 !100 Z 92

2 ED Z 92 K 0:17 !92 Z 76:4 3 ED Z 76:4 K 0:19 !76:4 Z 61:9

where the local ridges surrounding the minutiae can be picked up in any order. 5.6. Adaptive matching The feature vectors of a ngerprint are composed of an energy vector with respect to minutiae EM and an energy vector with respect to local ridges ED. The energy vectors EM and ED are formed by scanning the energy residuals of the rectangular tessellations with respect to minutiae and local ridges row by row, respectively. Fingerprint matching is based on nding the Euclidean distance measure with respect to minutiae (EDM) and with respect to local ridges new (EDD). EDM is computed between the energy vector EM of j the unknown ngerprint and the energy vector EM of the template image j while EDD is computed between the j new energy vector ED of the unknown ngerprint and ED of the template image j. Then the Euclidean distance measures are given by the following formulae [3]:  new  EDMnew; j Z EM K Ej 
M

Fig. 7. Cell adaptation. (a) Minutiae aligned in a cell of size 64!64. (b) Minutiae aligned in a cell of size 128!128.

q j j new new Z EM K EM T EM K EM  new  j EDDnew; j Z ED K ED  q j T j new new Z ED K ED ED K ED Dnew; j Z EDMnew; j C EDDnew; j 2

6 (7)

the candidate list otherwise the cell size is increased by 64!64 and the processes are repeated. Each time there is no match between the unknown and reference ngerprints the cell size increases by 64!64 until it becomes greater than the image size where the unknown ngerprint is rejected. Fig. 7 shows an illustration of cell adaptation where in Fig. 7(a.1) the two original minutiae are close to each other and accordingly they are aligned into one cell of size 64!64, while in Fig. 7(a.2) the same two minutiae are aligned into two different cells of sizes 64!64, this is due to minutiae displacement because of skin elasticity. Accordingly, a match is not found by using a tessellation of cell size 64!64, then the algorithm increases its cell size to 128!128 as in Fig. 7(b), consequently the tolerance increases to overcome minutiae displacement where the original minutiae and the displaced ones are aligned into cells of size 128!128 and a match can be found. Fig. 8 shows the pseudo code for the adaptive matching algorithm.

where D(new,j) is the average Euclidean distance of the two distance measures EDM(new,j) and EDD(new,j). We then assign the unknown print new to the template print j if D(new,j) has the smallest difference. Fixed rectangular tessellation is not efcient to handle distortions in ngerprint images which lead to many errors in input minutiae alignment. By using the adaptive matching technique we use a dynamic rectangular tessellation to reduce the effect of elastic deformations or the variations between different images which may be due to displacement or rotation. The adaptive matching algorithm starts with an initial cell of size 64!64, then it calculates the EDM and EDD for the unknown and reference ngerprints and then calculates the average Euclidean distance measure D. If a match is found then the reference ngerprint is added to

6. Experimental study In this section, the proposed matching technique was tested on the available standard benchmark database FVC2000 [24]. It consists of four different databases which are DB1, DB2, DB3 and DB4. Our experiments were conducted on DB1 where each ngerprint image of this database has the size 300!300 which is then scaled to 500!500 at the beginning of the adaptive matching. This database consists of 110 ngers acquired using low-cost optical sensors with each nger has eight impressions, the available from this database is from 101 to 110, which means that 80 ngerprint impressions were used in the experiments. Each ngerprint impression is enhanced and then normalized to a mean and variance of 100.

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Fig. 9. The ROC curves depicting matching performance.

Fig. 8. The algorithm of adaptive matching.

The ngerprint is then segmented and binarized before being submitted to the adaptive matching algorithm. To establish the verication accuracy of our ngerprint representation and matching accuracy, each ngerprint image of the same nger was matched with all other images of the same nger which forms 640 matching processes. This measures the genuine acceptance rate (GAR) while the cross matching between the ngerprint images of different ngers which forms 5760 matching processes measures the false acceptance rate (FAR). This means a total of 6400 matching processes were done during experiments. A matching was labeled correct if the matched pair is from one of the eight impressions of the same nger in the FVC database and is incorrect otherwise. We have four scenarios, the rst scenario says that the print belongs to the database but the test says it is false. The second says that the print belongs to the database and the test says it is true. The third says that the print does not belong to the database but

the test says it is false, while the fourth says that the print does not belong to the database and the test says it is true. The rst scenario measures false rejection rate (FRR) at various thresholds, the second scenario measures the GAR at various thresholds which equals to 1-FRR, the third scenario measures the FAR (False acceptance Rate) at various thresholds while the fourth scenario measures the GRR (Genuine Rejection Rate). Given the similarity measure between two matching pairs, the genuine acceptance rate is dened as the proportion of known ngerprints that are correctly recognized, while the false acceptance rate is dened as the proportion of unknown ngerprints that are falsely accepted. Besides the genuine acceptance rate of a matcher, the recognition time is also important, especially in real-time applications. The average time for comparing two energy vectors of different ngerprints is less than 7 milliseconds on a Pentium 850 MHz, PC with 64 MB RAM. Rejecting unknown ngerprints means that the system was capable of discriminating the unknown ngerprints from those in the reference database. A receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve is a plot of genuine acceptance rate against false acceptance rate that measures the overall performance of the system. Fig. 9 shows the ROC curves for the comparison with a minutiae-based matching algorithm in Ref. [6]. We notice that the ROC curve of the adaptive hybrid energy-based approach is over the ROC curves of the algorithm in Ref. [6], which means that our system outperforms the minutiae-based approach.

7. Conclusions We have presented a novel adaptive hybrid energy-based ngerprint matching technique which based on the computation of energy vectors for ngerprints and uses the adaptive matching technique to reduce the effects of variations between ngerprint images of the same nger which may

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be due to non-linear deformations which increases the genuine acceptance rate. Our matching technique uses the information extracted from both minutiae and their neighboring ridges by using an energy-based minimization process to improve matching accuracy. Also, to reduce the effect of false minutiae if present on the matching process small values for minutiae proportion ranks can be chosen. This matching technique is much simpler to implement than most of the matching techniques mentioned in the literature since the energy residuals require only simple computations. In comparison with Jain et al. in Ref. [18], we do not need to locate a reference point, which may be lost in noisy images or falsely detected, to form the FingerCode of the ngerprint. Also we do not need special sensors with reduced sizes to limit the amount of non-linear deformations by reducing the contact area as in Ref. [19]. Also, our system appears to support more rapid and robust search and retrieval strategies than most of the current approaches.

If we expand the summation in equation (A3) we get: V Z E0 K u1 !E0 K u2 !E1 K u3 !E2 . K um !EmK1 Now by induction, the rst difference gives the residual at step 1 i.e. E1 Z E0 K u1 !E0 Then we get: V Z E1 K u2 !E1 K u3 !E2 . K um !EmK1 At step tK1, the rst difference gives the residual E(t) i.e. EtK1 Z EtK2 K utK1 !EtK2 At step t, this residual can be modeled by using the following iterative equation: Et Z EtK1 K ut !EtK1 c t Z 1; 2.m (A4)

Appendix I The decomposition of the cell energy as a sum of local terms can be dened as: UZ
m X tZ1

ut !EtK1

(A1)

Where U is the total energy gained by m minutiae, also the same equation applies for the continuous ridges surrounding these m minutiae in the cell. At any processing step t, a minutia is chosen in any order to gain its amount of energy, then it is removed to avoid picking it up again. Each local term in equation (A1), consists of the gained energy by a minutia using its proportion rank MR computed in Section 5.1 or by its surrounding ridges using their proportion ranks Dd computed in Section 5.2 at step t. Each feature whether it is a minutia or the block of its surrounding ridges gains its energy from the residual energy E(t) after the feature at processing step tK1 has gained its energy. The sum of these local terms does not sum up to the initial energy E(0). This is due to the differences in the relative proportion ranks of the minutiae and the blocks of surrounding ridges. Then the cell energy residual can be dened as follows: V Z E0 K U (A2)

where the minutia or the surrounding ridges at step t has a local term ut !EtK1 relative to the proportion rank ut $ EtK1 is the amount of energy available for processing at step t. The proportion rank term of a minutia or a surrounding ridges incorporates the knowledge on the decomposition process. The above iterated difference equation can be considered as an energy local minimizer of the cell energy, where for each feature at processing step t the new amount of cell energy is predicted by its members of features. At step tZm we obtain the amount of cell energy remained after processing all m minutiae.

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Where V is the energy residual after all the features in this cell gained their energy. At step t, we use the energy residual available after step tK1. Starting from step 0, we can rewrite this cell energy residual as follows: ! m X t 0 tK1 u !E VZ E K (A3)
tZ1

500

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