A Neural Network-Based Partial Fingerprint Image Identification Method for Crime Scenes

Fingerprints are the most widely used of all biological characteristics in public safety and forensic identification. However, fingerprint images extracted from the crime scene are incomplete. On the one hand, due to the lack of effective area in partial fingerprint images, the extracted features are insufficient. On the other hand, a broken ridge may lead to a large number of false feature points, which affect the accuracy of fingerprint recognition. Existing fingerprint identification methods are not ideal for partial fingerprint identification. To overcome these problems, this paper proposes an attention-based partial fingerprint identification model named APFI. Firstly, the algorithm utilizes the residual network (ResNet) for feature descriptor extraction, which generates a representation of spatial information on fingerprint expression. Secondly, the channel attention module is inserted into the proposed model to obtain more accurate fingerprint feature information from the residual block. Then, to improve the identification accuracy of partial fingerprints, the angular distance between features is used to calculate the similarity of fingerprints. Finally, the proposed model is trained and validated on a home-made partial fingerprint image dataset. Experiments on the home-made fingerprint datasets and the NIST-SD4 datasets show that the partial fingerprint identification method proposed in this paper has higher identification accuracy than other state-of-the-art methods.