Performance of fingerprint quality measures depending on sensor technology

Although many image quality measures have been proposed for fingerprints, few works have taken into account how differences among capture devices impact the image quality. Several representative measures for assessing the quality of fingerprint images are compared using an optical and a capacitive sensor. We implement and test a representative set of measures that rely on different fingerprint image features for quality assessment. The capability to discriminate between images of different quality and the relationship with the verification performance are studied. For our verification experiments, we use minutiae- and ridge-based matchers, which are the most common approaches for fingerprint recognition. We report differences depending on the sensor, and interesting relationships between sensor technology and features used for quality assessment are also pointed out. (C) 2008 SPIE and IS&T.