Fingerprint Classification by Combination of Flat and Structural Approaches

This paper investigates the advantages of the combination of flat and structural approaches for fingerprint classification. A novel structural classification method is described and compared with the “multichannel” flat method recently proposed by Jain et al. [1]. Performances and complementarity of the two methods are evaluated using NIST-4 Database. A simple approach based on the concept of “metaclassification” is proposed for the combination of the two fingerprint classification methods. Reported results point out the potential advantages of the combination of flat and structural fingerprint-classification approaches. In particular, such results show that the exploitation of structural information allows increasing classification performances.