On the Correlation of Image Size to System Accuracy in Automatic Fingerprint Identification Systems

The accuracy of Automatic Fingerprint Identification Systems (AFIS) is dependent on many variables ranging from the quality of the friction skin surface itself, to the ability of the image acquisition device to accurately image the fingerprint, to the feature extraction and matching software to detect the feature set and declare a correlation (a match/no match) based on some criteria. The genesis of these systems exclusively used rolled impression fingerprint imagery. As AFIS developers attempted to reduce the cost and improve the usability of these systems for commercial applications, plain impression imagery was adopted and total scanned image area was significantly reduced. This paper will quantify the effects of reduced image area on overall system accuracy in a single finger plain impression environment.