Fingerprint Template Ageing vs. Template Changes Revisited

Abstract

This study investigates the impact of “ghost” fingerprint and minutiae information in 4 year time-span separated fingerprint datasets. A high amount of ghost fingerprints within the data, eventually a source for differences in acquisition conditions, might be responsible for recently reported template ageing effects. According to that, various experiments have been performed to get rid of this problematic image content and to compare the corresponding matching results to the performance figures using the non altered imprints. The analysis with respect to detected increased error rates exhibits very similar effects for all considered methods no matter if ghost fingerprint information is removed or not. Thus, ghost fingerprints are not responsible for the observed effects.