Enhanced fingerprint pattern classification: Integrating attention modules with lightweight deep learning models

Abstract

Large fingerprint databases can make the automated search process tedious and time‐consuming. Fingerprint pattern classification is a significant step in the identification system's complexity in terms of time and speed. Although several fingerprint algorithms have been developed for classification tasks, further improvements in performance and efficiency are still required. Most of the fingerprint algorithms use deep learning techniques. However, some deep learning techniques can be resource‐intensive and computationally expensive, while others can disregard the spatial relationships between the features used in classifying fingerprint patterns. This study proposes using lightweight deep learning models (i.e., MobileNet and EfficientNet‐B0) integrated with attention modules to classify fingerprint patterns. The two lightweight models are modified, yielding MobileNet+ and EfficientNet‐B0+ models. The lightweight deep learning models can help achieve optimal performance and reduce computational complexity. The attention modules focus on distinctive features for classification. Our proposed approach integrates four attention modules for fingerprint pattern classification into two lightweight deep learning models, that is, MobileNet+ and EfficientNet‐B0+. To evaluate our approach, we use two publicly available fingerprint datasets, that is, the NIST special database 301 dataset and the LivDet dataset. The evaluation results show that the EfficientNet‐B0+ model achieves the highest classification accuracy of 97% with only 854,086 training parameters. As a conclusion, we consider the training parameters small enough for the EfficientNet‐B0+ model to be deployed on low‐resource devices.