Image versus feature mosaicing: A case study in fingerprints

Fingerprint mosaicing entails the reconciliation of information presented by two or more impressions of a finger in order to generate composite information. It can be accomplished by blending these impressions into a single mosaic, or by integrating the feature sets (viz., minutiae information) pertaining to these impressions. In this work, we use Thin-plate Splines (TPS) to model the relative transformation between two impressions of a finger thereby accounting for the non-linear distortion present between them. The estimated deformation is used (a) to register the two images and blend them into a single entity before extracting minutiae from the resulting mosaic (image mosaicing); and (b) to register the minutiae point sets corresponding to the two images and integrate them into a single master minutiae set (feature mosaicing). Experiments conducted on the FVC 2002 DB1 database indicate that both mosaicing schemes result in improved matching performance although feature mosaicing is observed to outperform image mosaicing.