A Finger-based Identification System

S. Ribari, Member, IEEE and N. Pavei, Member, IEEE

Abstract -- This paper presents a multimodal biometric identification system based on the features of human fingers. We describe a new biometric approach to personal identification using the Regularized-Direct Linear Discriminant Analysis (RD-LDA) features extracted from four digitprints (prints of fingers between the first and third phalanx) and four fingerprints, with fusion applied at the matching-score level. The identification experiments were conducted on a database consisting of 1840 hand images (184 people). A correct identification rate of 100% suggests that the system can be used in medium/high-security environments. Index terms -- Biometrics, Fusion, Identification, Linear Discriminant Analysis

I. INTRODUCTION human hand provides the source for a number of physiological biometric features; among the most commonly used are the geometry of the hand [1][3], the dermatoglyptic patterns of the fingerprints [4] and the palmprints [5]. These features are used in unimodal and multimodal biometric systems for user authentication. A detailed overview of the progress in this area can be found in [4] [8]. In the literature [8] and on websites [9] there are descriptions of personal recognition systems that are based on measurements of only one or two fingers. Such systems are proposed for low/medium-security environments. The single-finger geometry-based biometric system uses only the index finger. This finger pushes a plunger/button, which goes into the device. The rollers, which scan the finger, then take measurements of 12 cross-sections of 1 phalanx of the finger. The two-finger geometry-based biometric system uses a camera-based sensor system to take 3-dimensional measurements of the index and middle fingers. From the image a set of geometrical features of the fingers (length, ___________________________

This work was supported in part by the Slovenian Ministry of Higher Education, Science and Technology, as part of the research programme Metrology and Biometric Systems and by the Croatian Ministry of Science, Education and Sports, as part of the scientific project Theory, Modelling and Applying of Autonomy Oriented Computing Structures. S. Ribaric is with Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, University of Zagreb, Unska3, 10000 Zagreb, Croatia, (e-mail: slobodan.ribaric@fer.hr) N. Pavesic is with Faculty of Electrical Engineering, University of Ljubljana, Traka c. 25, 1000 Ljubljana, (e-mail: nikola.pavesic@fe.unilj.si)

width and thickness of the fingers measured on different finger sections) is extracted. An online authentication system based on the fusion of the geometry of four fingers and four finger-strips (called digitprints) is described in [10]. A digitprint region is defined with respect to the fingers line of symmetry and takes an area between the first phalanx of the finger and the region of the fingerprints. The system is based on fusion at the matching-score level of the finger geometry and the Principal Component Analysis (PCA) features extracted from the digitprints. The experimental results, obtained on a database of 1270 images of 127 people, showed the effectiveness of the system in the sense of an EER = 1.17% and the minimum TER = 2.03% for identification. A multimodal biometric personal identification system, which integrates the Most Discriminant Features (MDF) extracted from digitprints and fingerprints, is described in [11]. The system is based on the fusion at the matchingscore level. Identification experiments were conducted on a database consisting of 1840 hand-images (184 persons). The correct identification rate of 99.80 % was obtained. For medium/high-security applications unimodal and/or multimodal fingerprint-based systems are used. The state of the art in fingerprint recognition is extensively described in the monograph by Maltoni et al. [6]. Most fingerprint-based verification systems follow the minutiae-based approach [12], [13]. To overcome the sensitivity of minutiae-based approaches to the noise of the sensor and the distortion during the acquisition of the fingerprint, fingerprintrecognition systems that follow appearance-based approaches [14][16] have recently been developed. These systems also offer low error rates for fingerprint images of poor quality or images captured by small solid-state sensors, but at a much higher computational efficiency than minutiae- and ridge-based approaches. In this paper we propose an identification system based on the same biometrics traits (digitprints and fingerprints) as in [11], but instead of the Most Discriminant Features (MDF), the Regularized-Direct Linear Discriminant Analysis (RD-LDA) features are used.

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II.

SYSTEM DESCRIPTION

Fig. 1 shows the block-diagram of the proposed multimodal biometric identification system based on the fusion of four fingerprint and four digitprint RD-LDA features at the matching-score level. In the image-acquisition phase, an image of four fingers is taken using a scanner. The spatial resolution of the images is 600 dots per inch (dpi) / 256 grey levels.

Geometry normalization is applied to the original greyscale hand image for each region of interest to obtain the corresponding sub-images. After that, the lighting normalization is performed using a histogram-enhancement method. The normalized sub-images of the four digitprints and the four fingerprints sub-images are transformed by using the

Image acquisition

Preprocessing

Database (user's templates)

Finding geometry and light normalization

Feature extraction module (little fingerprint)

Feature extraction module (ring fingerprint)

Feature extraction module (middle fingerprint)

Feature extraction module (inde fingerprint)

Feature extraction module (little digitprint)

Featur extraction module (ring digitprint)

Feature extraction module (middle digitprint)

Feature extraction module (index digitprint)

Matching module

Matching module

Matching module

Matching module

Matching module

Matching module

Matching module

Matching module

Score normalization

Score normalization

Score normalization

Score normalization

Score normalization

Score normalization

Score normalization

Score normalization

Fusion

Decision module

User identity

Fig. 1. Block-diagram of the proposed multimodal identification system . In the pre-processing module some standard image preprocessing and enhancement procedures (global thresholding, contour extraction, extraction of the relevant points on the contour) are applied. Based on the hand contour and the reference (stabile) points on it, the eight regions of interest (ROIs) are localized: four strip-like regions of the fingers, called digitprints [17], and four regions of the fingerprint. Regularized-Direct Linear Discriminant Analysis (RDLDA) into eight feature spaces: four RD-Fisherdigitprint spaces and four RD-Fisherfingerprint spaces. Each of these eight feature spaces is (C 1) dimensional, where C is the number of classes, i.e., the people in the personal identification. The matching between the corresponding vectors (livetemplates) and the templates from a database is performed

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in the subsequent eight matching modules. After the normalization of the matchers outputs, fusion at the matching-score level is obtained by means of the total similarity measure. In the decision module, the 1-NN rule is applied and a final decision is made (the user is identified). III.

TEMPLATE GENERATION

the hand in the images, simple global thresholding [19] provides satisfactory results. A contour-following algorithm is applied to a binarized image to extract the part of the hand that includes the four fingers. The contour is then processed in order that the relevant points for finding regions of interest (ROIs) in the original grey-scale image are determined. The extracted hand contour and the relevant points are shown in Figure 3.

The template, as a mathematical representation of the biometric data in our system, consists of eight feature vectors: four fingerprint-feature vectors: (Fix, i = 1, 2, 3, 4) and four digitprint-feature vectors: (Dix, i = 1, 2, 3, 4), where Fix and Dix; i = 1, 2, 3, 4 represent corresponding feature vectors obtained from two normalized ROIs of the little, ring, middle and index finger, respectively. Note that the thumb is not used due to its specific position with respect to the surface of the scanner that is used as an acquisition device. A. Image Acquisition Images of the part of the right hand (four fingers) are scanned at 600 dpi/256 grey levels using a small scanner (the dimensions of the scanning area are 11x16 cm). The user puts his/her four fingers, spread naturally, on the scanner. Note that there are no pegs, or any other hand-position constrainers. Examples of the images acquired with this method are shown in Fig. 2. Fig. 3. Hand contour with the relevant points C. Finding ROIs Based on the hand contour with the relevant points, the line of symmetry of the fingers, and the four auxiliary points for each finger (Fig. 4) eight rectangular/square regions of interest (ROIs) are determined. These eight ROIs four digitprint regions and four fingerprint regions (little, ring, middle and index finger) are localized in the original greyscale image (Fig. 4). D. Geometry and light normalization The ROIs in the original grey-scale images vary in size and orientation from image to image. In order to apply the RD-LDA transform, they all need to be normalized to exactly the same size and orientation. The ROI sub-images are cropped from the grey-scale image, rotated to the same position, and then sized to the fixed dimensions. The fingerprint sub-images are normalized to 64 x 64 pixels, and the digitprint sub-images are normalized to 16 x 64 pixels by using a bilinear transformation. Fig. 5 shows an example of eight ROIs before and after geometry normalization. For light normalization we used and tested two methods: histogram fitting and contrast enhancement [18]. Based on the results of experiments we decided to perform the light normalization using the contrast-enhancement method. Fig. 2. Examples of the acquired images B. Preprocessing The acquired image is binarized using thresholding. Due to the controlled light conditions during the acquisition process and the high contrast between the background and E. Feature extraction At the feature-extraction stage the features are generated from the normalized ROI sub-images of the digitprints and the fingerprints by means of the Regularized-Direct Linear Discriminant Analysis (RD-LDA) [20]. The process of obtaining features can be briefly described as follows:

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the between-class scatter matrix SB

S B = ni (m i m)(mi m)T
i =1
C

(2)

and the within-class scatter matrix SW

SW =

i =1 x k

(x
i

m i )( x k m i )T

(3)

Fig. 4. Original grey-scale image with eight regions of interest marked

where mi and m are the class mean and the global mean, respectively, and ni is the number of ROI training vectors in the class i. The projection W = WRD-LDA is chosen to maximize the regularized Fishers criterion:

J ( W) =

| WT S B W | | ( W T S B W) + ( W T S W W ) |

(4)

a)

where 0 1 is the parameter that controls the strength of the regularization. In [20] it is shown how the regularized Fishers criterion is equivalent to the original Fishers criterion for 01. The n-dimensional column vectors of the matrix WRD-LDA are generalized eigenvectors corresponding to the largest eigenvalues of the matrix WRD-LDA. Such generalized eigenvectors have the same dimensions as the original ROI sub-images, and they can be represented as k l images, called the RD-Fisherimages. The m C 1 eigenvectors define the RD-Fisherdigitprint and RD-Fisherfingerprint spaces. The template, i.e. feature vector y {Fi, Di; i = 1, 2, 3, 4} is obtained by: y = WTRD-LDA (x m), (5) where m is global mean, i.e. mean vector of corresponding ROI training vectors and x is the vector which represents corresponding normalized ROI sub-image. The complete template for a person p is represented by eight m-component feature vectors: F1,p , D1,p , ..., F4,p, D4,p, representing the fingerprints and the digitprints of the little, ring, middle, and index finger, respectively. IV.

b) Fig. 5. An example of eight ROIs before (a) and after geometry normalization (b) Given a set of n ROI training vectors xk of dimension d, each belonging to one of C classes or people in personal recognition {1, 2,,C}, we can compute: the total scatter matrix ST

IDENTIFICATION

In order to identify a user with the system the following steps are performed: i) the matching process between the live-template and the templates from the database; ii) the score normalization of the matcher's outputs; iii) the fusion based on the sum rule; iv) the application of the 1-NN classification rule. A. Matching and Score Normalization

ST = (x k m)(x k m)T
k =1

(1)

The matching between the live templates and the templates from the database is performed in eight matching modules. The matching is based on the Euclidean distance. These distances are normalized and transform into similarity

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measures Si, i = 1,2, ... , 8 by means of eight piece-wise linear transformation functions, which were determined experimentally from the training set of the database in the way described in [18]. Figure 6. shows the function, the mapping from the Euclidean distance D into the similarity measure S, for the ROI sub-image of the middle fingerprint.

The complete template for a person p is represented by eight 183-component feature vectors: F1,p , D1,p , ..., F4,p, D4,p. The parameter , (equation (4)) that controls the strength of the regularization, is experimentally determined from the recognition rate for the training set, and its value is 0.001. The results of the close-set identification are summarized in Table I. This table also gives the rates of correct identification for each of the four fingerprints and digitprints, as well as the rates of correct identification obtained by fusion at the matching-score level.
TABLE I. RATES OF CORRECT CLOSED-SET IDENTIFICATION

Region of interest
Fig. 6. The piece-wise linear transformation function D S

for the ROI sub-images of the middle fingerprints ( is the mean value of the distances for the middle fingerprints from the training set) B. Fusion After the score normalization of the matcher's outputs, fusion based on the sum rule is applied. The total similarity measure St is obtained as:

Fingerprint-little finger Fingerprint-ring finger Fingerprint-middle finger Fingerprint-index finger Digitprint-little finger Digitprint-ring finger Digitprint-middle finger Digitprint -index finger Fusion-fingerprints+digitprints

Correct identification [%] 91,63 96,30 96,85 96,63 97,17 98,04 99,13 98,59 100

St = w1S1 + w2 S 2 + ... + w8 S8 ,
where the values

(6)

of the weight factors wi 0, i = 1,2,...,8 , are determined according to the result of the identification based on each ROI (see Table I), and

The results of the experiments demonstrate that a very high correct-identification rate (from 99.13% for the digitprint-middle finger to 100% for the fusion of four fingerprints and digitprints) can be achieved with the system by fusion at the matching-score level of four fingerprint and four digitprint regions. VI.

w
i =1

= 1 . The indexes i= 1, 2,...,8 indicate the little,

CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORK

ring, middle, and index finger ROIs, respectively. C. Decision By using the 1-NN classification rule based on the maximum total similarity, the final decision (user identity) is made. V.

EXPERIMENTS AND RESULTS

The closed-set identification test was performed on a database consisting of ten images of the right hand of 184 people (184 image classes, 10 images per class; a total of 1840 hand images). The database was collected during two sessions over a period of three months. The five images from each image class in the database were chosen randomly and used in the training and enrolment phases to create the client database. The remaining five images for each of the 184 classes were used for the identification test. In total there were 920 attempts.

We have developed an experimental biometric identification system based on fingerprint and digitprint features of four human hands fingers. The RD-LDA approach is used for feature extraction. Fusion at the matching-score level of RD-LDA coefficients obtained from four fingerprint and four digitprint regions is used. The experimental results, obtained on a database of 1840 images of 184 people, show the effectiveness of our system in the sense of a 100% correct identification rate. The results show the feasibility of the RD-LDA features (extracted from fingerprints and digitprints) for biometric identification as well as the effects of fusion at the matching-score level on improving the systems accuracy. In the future, we plan to test the system on a larger database collected over a longer period of time. We also plan to introduce features extracted from simultaneously acquired infrared images of fingers dorsal surface that will be used for liveness detection.

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VII.
[1] [2]

REFERENCES

VIII.

BIOGRAPHIES

[3]

[4] [5] [6] [7]

[8] [9] [10]

[11]

[12]

[13] [14]

[15] [16]

[17]

[18]

[19] [20]

M. Golfarelli, D. Maio, and D. Maltoni, "On the Error-Reject Trade-Off in Biometric Verification Systems", IEEE Trans. on the PAMI, Vol. 19, No. 7, pp. 786-796, 1997. A. K.Jain, A. Ross, and S. Pankanti, "A Prototype Hand Geometry-based Verification System", 2nd Int. Conference on Audio- and Video-based Personal Authentication (AVBPA), Washington,, pp. 166-171, March 1999 R. Sanchez-Reillo, C. Sanchez-Avila, and A. Gonzalez-Marcos, "Biometric Identification Through Hand Geometry Measurements", IEEE Trans. on PAMI, Vol. 22, No. 10, pp. 1168-1171, 2000. A. K. Jain, S. Pankanti, and R. Bolle, "An IdentityAutentication System Using Fingerprints", Proceedings of the IEEE, vol.85, no 9, pp.1365-1388, 1997. D. D Zhang, Palmprint Authentication, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Norwell, 2004. D. Maltoni, D. Maio, A. K. Jain, and S. Prabhakar, Handbook of Fingerprint Recognition, Springer-Verlag, New York, 2003. N. Pavei, S. Ribari, and D. Ribari, "Personal Authentication Using Hand-geometry and Palmprint Features - the State of the Art", C. Vielhauer et al. (Eds.): Biometrics: Challenges arising from theory to practice, Cambridge, pp. 17-26, 2004. J. R. Vacca, Biometric Technologies and Verification Systems, Elsevier, 2007. BioMet Partners Inc., http://www.biomet.ch/ S. Ribari, I. Fratri, "An OnlineBiometric Authentication System Based on Eigenfingers and Finger-Geometry", Proceedings of 13th European Signal Processing Conference, Antalya, Turkey, CD ROM, (5 pages) 2005. S. Ribari, N. Pavei, "A finger-based personal identification system, International conference Automatics and Informatics '07, Bulgaria, Sofia, October 3-6, Proceedings: John Atanasoff celebration days. Sofia: Union of Automation and Informatics, vol. 2, 2007, pp. III/29-32. 2007. N. K. Ratha, K. Karu, S. Chen, and A. K. Jain, "A Real-time matching system for large Fingerprint Databases", IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, vol. 18, no. 8, pp. 799-813, 1996. A. K. Jain, L. Hong, and R. Bolle, "On-line Fingerprint Verification", IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, vol. 19, no. 4, pp. 302-314. 1997. M. Tico, E. Immonen, P. Ramo, P. Kuosmanen, and J. Saarinen, "Fingerprint Recognition Using Wavelet Features", Proceedings of the IEEE Int. Symposium on Systems and Circuits ISCAS 2001, Sydney, May 6-9, II, pp. 21-24, 2001. C. J. Lee, S. D. Wang, "Fingerprint Feature Extraction Using Gabor Filters", Electronic Letters, vol. 35, pp. 288-290. Feb. 1999. A. T. B. Jin, D. N. C. Ling, and O. T. Song, "An Efficient Fingerprint Verification System Using Integrated Wavelet and Fourier-Mellin Invariant Transform", Image and Vision Computing, vol. 22, pp. 503-513, Jan. 2004. S. Ribari, I. Fratri, "A Biometric Identification System Based on Eigenpalm and Eigenfinger Features", IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, vol. 27, no. 11, pp. 1698-1709, 2005. S. Ribari, D. Ribari, N. Pavei, "Multimodal Biometric Useridentification System for Network-based Applications", IEE Proceedings on Vision, Image, Signal Processing, vol.150, no. 6, , pp.409-416, 2003. R. Gonzalez, C. R. E. Woods, Digital Image Processing, Addison Wesley, Reading, Massachusetts, 1993. J. Lu, K.N. Plataniotis, and, A. N. Venetsanopoulos, Regularization studies of linear discriminant analysis in small sample size scenarios with application to face recognition, Pattern Recognition Letters, vol. 26, no. 2, pp. 181191, 2005.

Slobodan Ribari received the B.S. degree in electronics, the M.S. degree in automatics, and the PhD. degree in electrical engineering from the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Ljubljana, Slovenia, in 1974, 1976, and 1982, respectively. He is currently a Full Professor at the Department of Electronics, Microelectronics, Computer and Intelligent Systems, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, University of Zagreb, Croatia. His research interests include Pattern Recognition, Artificial Intelligence, Biometrics, Computer Architecture and Robot Vision. He is author of more than 150 papers and four books (Microprocessor Architecture, The Fifth Computer Generation Architecture, Advanced Microprocessor Architectures, CISC and RISC Computer Architecture) and co-author of one (An Introduction to Pattern Recognition). Dr. Ribari is a member of the IEEE, ISAI and IAPR. Nikola Pavei was born in 1946. He received his B.Sc. degree in electronics, M.Sc. degree in automatics, and Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, in 1970, 1973 and 1976, respectively. Since 1970 he has been a staff member at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering in Ljubljana, where he is currently head of the Laboratory of Artificial Perception, Systems and Cybernetics. His research interests include pattern recognition, neural networks, image processing, speech processing, and information theory. He is the author and co-author of more than two hundred papers and three books addressing several aspects of the above areas. Professor Nikola Pavei was the recipient of the Mario Osana Award in 1974, the Vratislav Bedjan Award in 1976, the Boris Kidri Fund Award in 1982, and the Milan Vidmar Award in 1996. He is a member of IEEE, IAPR, the Slovenian Association of Electrical Engineers and Technicians (Meritorious Member), the Slovenian Pattern Recognition Society (Founder and first president), and the Slovenian Society for Medical and Biological Engineers.

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