Fingerprint Quality Assessment Combining Blind Image Quality, Texture and Minutiae Features

Biometric sample quality assessment approaches are generally designed in terms of utility property due to the potential difference between human perception of quality and the biometric quality requirements for a recognition system. This study proposes a utility based quality assessment method of fingerprints by considering several complementary aspects: 1) Image quality assessment without any reference which is consistent with human conception of inspecting quality, 2) Textural features related to the fingerprint image and 3) minutiae features which correspond to the most used information for matching. The proposed quality metric is obtained by a linear combination of these features and is validated with a reference metric using different approaches. Experiments performed on several trial databases show the benefit of the proposed fingerprint quality metric.