Fast Fingerprint Classification with Deep Neural Networks

Reducing the number of comparisons in automated fingerprint identification systems is essential when dealing with a large database. Fingerprint classification allows to achieve this goal by dividing fingerprints into several categories, but it presents still some challenges due to the large intra-class variations and the small inter-class variations. The vast majority of the previous methods uses global characteristics, in particular the orientation image, as features of a classifier. This makes the feature extraction stage highly dependent on preprocessing techniques and usually computationally expensive. In this work we evaluate the performance of two pre-trained convolutional neural networks fine-tuned on the NIST SD4 benchmark database. The obtained results show that this approach is comparable with other results in the literature, with the advantage of a fast feature extraction stage.