Fingerprint matching by genetic algorithms

Fingerprint matching is still a challenging problem for reliable person authentication because of the complex distortions involved in two impressions of the same finger. In this paper, we propose a fingerprint-matching approach based on genetic algorithms (GA), which tries to find the optimal transformation between two different fingerprints. In order to deal with low-quality fingerprint images, which introduce significant occlusion and clutter of minutiae features, we design a fitness function based on the local properties of each triplet of minutiae. The experimental results on National Institute of Standards and Technology fingerprint database, NIST-4, not only show that the proposed approach can achieve good performance even when a large portion of fingerprints in the database are of poor quality, but also show that the proposed approach is better than another approach, which is based on mean-squared error estimation.