Comparative Study of Fingerprint Database Indexing Methods

Nowadays, there are large country-sized fingerprint databases for identification, border access controls and also for Visa issuance procedures around the world. Fingerprint indexing techniques aim to speed up the research process in automatic fingerprint identification systems. Therefore, several preselection, classification and indexing techniques have been proposed in the literature. Even if, the proposed systems have been evaluated with different experimental protocols, it is difficult to assess their relative performance. The main objective of this paper is to provide a comparative study of fingerprint indexing methods using a common experimental protocol. Four fingerprint indexing methods, using naive, cascade, matcher and Minutiae Cylinder Code (MCC) approaches are evaluated on FVC databases from the Fingerprint Verification Competition (FVC) using the Cumulative Matches Curve (CMC) and the computing time required. Our study shows that MCC gives the best compromise between identification accuracy and computation time.