Awesome Forensic Fingerprint Matching

A curated list of awesome tools and literature for forensic fingerprint matching.

Open source software

Fingerprint quality evaluation

• NIST's fingerprint image quality algorithm (NFIQ). Part of the NIST open source Biometric Image Software (see below).
  • See NFIQ2 in particular.

Minutiae-based matching algorithms

• FingerJetFXOSE minutiae extraction algorithm

• ⭐ NIST's open source Biometric Image Software. Complete suite of tools for minutiae-based fingerprint matching developped for the FBI and DHS. Contains:

  • A "fingerprint image quality algorithm, NFIQ, which analyses a fingerprint image and assigns a quality value of 1 (highest quality) 5(lowest quality) to the image."
  • A fingerprint pattern classification system, PCASYS.
  • A minutiae detector called, MINDTCT.
  • A fingerprint matching algorithm, BOZORTH3.
  • More, such as fingerprint detection and segmentation algorithms, and image manipulation utilities.

• ⭐ LatentAFIS. Latent fingerprint identification and matching. Developped at MSU and supported by a series of paper. Provides a gui as well as command line tools.

• SourceAFIS. Open source fingerprint software (Java and .NET) with an explanation of their algorithm here.

• OpenAFIS. High performance C++ fingerprint matching library. Note: does not extract minutiae.

Publicly available software (closed source)

• FRStat software to statistically assess "the significance of an association between two friction ridge skin impressions." Paper is available here.

Literature

• Maltoni et al. (2009) Handbook of Fingerprint Recognition: thorough treatment of minutiae-based methods with additional topics such as synthetic fingerprint generation.

• PhD thesis "Fingerprint Recognition for Forensic Applications". Develops an evidence evaluation framework based on probabilistic matching (i.e. using likelihood ratios).

• Wavelet transforms for fingerprint matching: Automatic fingerprint identification system based on Level 3 features.