Designing an efficient fingerprint recognition technique is an ill-posed problem. Recently, many researchers have utilized machine learning techniques to improve the fingerprint recognition rate. The random forest (RF) is found to be one of the extensively utilized machine learning techniques for fingerprint recognition. Although it provides good recognition results at significant computational speed, still there is room for improvement. RF is not so-effective for high-dimensional features and also when features contain both discrete and continuous values at the same time. Therefore, in this paper, a novel similarity measure-based random forest (NRF) is proposed. The proposed technique, initially, computes both mutual information and conditional entropy. Thereafter, it uses three designed if-then rules to obtain final information measure. Additionally, to obtain feature set for fingerprint dataset, dual-tree complex wavelet transform is used to evaluate complex detail coefficients. Thereafter, ring project is considered to compute significant moments from these complex detail coefficients. Finally, information gain-based feature selection technique is used to select potential features. To prevent over-fitting, 20-fold cross validation is also used. Extensive experiments are considered to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed technique. The comparative analyses reveal that the proposed technique outperforms the existing techniques in terms of accuracy, f-measure, sensitivity, specificity, kappa statistics and computational speed.
