Towards Reconstructing Fingerprints From Minutiae Points

We show that minutiae information can reveal substantial details such as the orientation field and the class of the associated fingerprint that can potentially be used to reconstruct the original fingerprint image. The proposed technique utilizes minutiae triplet information to estimate the orientation map of the parent fingerprint. The estimated orientation map is observed to be remarkably consistent with the underlying ridge flow. We next discuss a classification technique that utilizes minutiae information alone to infer the class of the fingerprint. Preliminary results indicate that the seemingly random minutiae distribution of a fingerprint can reveal important class information. Furthermore, contrary to what has been claimed by several minutiae-based fingerprint system vendors, we demonstrate that the minutiae template of a user may be used to reconstruct fingerprint images.