Assessment of Sensor Ageing-Impact in Air Travelled Fingerprint Capturing Devices

Abstract

Biometric recognition performance is affected by many factors, like varying acquisition conditions or ageing related effects, commonly denoted as biometric template ageing. Image sensor ageing, being part of biometric template ageing and a sub-field of image and video forensics, leads to defective pixels due to cosmic radiation, depending on the altitude. So far, image sensor ageing has only been a peripheral target in fingerprint research. We investigate the impact of image sensor ageing on various fingerprint capturing devices, including optical, capacitive and thermal ones. We established a fingerprint ageing dataset utilising 10 capturing devices which travelled on an air-plane for 127 days (to increase the number of developed defects). By evaluating the samples captured prior to their travel and afterwards using several state-of-the-art fingerprint quality metrics as well as minutiae-based fingerprint recognition systems we quantify the effect of image sensor ageing on fingerprint recognition. Furthermore, by employing a defect detection technique we quantify the number of defects developed during that period.