Robust Identification and Segmentation of the Outer Skin Layers in Volumetric Fingerprint Data

Abstract

Despite the long history of fingerprint biometrics and its use to authenticate individuals, there are still some unsolved challenges with fingerprint acquisition and presentation attack detection (PAD). Currently available commercial fingerprint capture devices struggle with non-ideal skin conditions, including soft skin in infants. They are also susceptible to presentation attacks, which limits their applicability in unsupervised scenarios such as border control. Optical coherence tomography (OCT) could be a promising solution to these problems. In this work, we propose a digital signal processing chain for segmenting two complementary fingerprints from the same OCT fingertip scan: One fingerprint is captured as usual from the epidermis (“outer fingerprint”), whereas the other is taken from inside the skin, at the junction between the epidermis and the underlying dermis (“inner fingerprint”). The resulting 3D fingerprints are then converted to a conventional 2D grayscale representation from which minutiae points can be extracted using existing methods. Our approach is device-independent and has been proven to work with two different time domain OCT scanners. Using efficient GPGPU computing, it took less than a second to process an entire gigabyte of OCT data. To validate the results, we captured OCT fingerprints of 130 individual fingers and compared them with conventional 2D fingerprints of the same fingers. We found that both the outer and inner OCT fingerprints were backward compatible with conventional 2D fingerprints, with the inner fingerprint generally being less damaged and, therefore, more reliable.

Mobile Contactless Fingerprint Presentation Attack Detection: Generalizability and Explainability

“…It should be noted that several works propose contactless fingerprint PAD schemes on ShortWave InfraRed (SWIR) [32], [33], Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) [34], [35] or Laser Speckle Contrast Imaging (LSCI) [33] images. These mechanisms require specialized hardware and highly constrained capturing scenarios.…”

Biometric Technologies Based on Optical Coherence Tomography

“…As mentioned in the Introduction, OCT imaging also has interesting advantages in applications other than ophthalmic diagnostics. Article [ 6 ] presents solutions for biometric identification based on the fingerprint, which is imaged using an OCT device. A Thorlabs-prepared scanner was used to acquire the OCT image.…”

Fingerprint Systems: Sensors, Image Acquisition, Interoperability and Challenges

“…OCT is the latest, optical, non-destructive, non-invasive high-resolution and significant method for biomedical investigation [ 91 ]. With the recent advancement, biometric applications have used this technique in 3D fingerprint image acquisition [ 92 , 93 , 94 , 95 ].…”

“…OCT is the latest, optical, non-destructive, non-invasive high-resolution method for 3D fingerprint image acquisition [ 92 , 93 , 94 , 95 ]. The fingerprint consists of epidermal and dermal layers to represent surface and internal regions of the fingerprint.…”

“…2018 [140] 2013 [141] Photometric stereo 2020 [144] 2019 [145] 2017 [146] Structured light imaging 2021 [3] 2015 [142] 2014 [147] Active and passive stereo camera 2020 [31] 2020 [32] 2017 [86] 2016 [33] 2015 [69] 2015 [70] Ultrasonic sensing 2022 [95] 2019 [92] 2020 [93] 2020 [94] Optical coherence tomography (OCT)…”