ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT ON BIOMETRIC TRAITS AND

METHODS TO IMPROVE BIOMETRIC RECOGNITION SYSTEM

THEJASWINI.P
Department of ECE JSSATE Bangalore, India

SRIKANTASWAMY.R
Department of ECE SIT Tumkur,India

MANJUNATHA A S
Department of CSE SIT Tumkur, India

ABSTRACT: The biometric data collected during the enrolment and recognition time is subjected
to vary due to various environmental conditions. This variation degrades the performance of the
Biometric system to recognise the users correctly. This environmental impact on Biometric
variation leads to study, analyse and develop advanced methods for improved Biometric based
recognition system. To address these issues a study has been conducted on environmental impact
on biometric traits and some of the methods to improve the Biometric recognition system,
including Adaptive Biometric systems.

KEYWORDS: Biometrics traits, Template, Wet Finger, Dry Finger, Fingerprint recognition,
Multiple Enrolment, Image enhancement, Adaptive methods, Template update, Self-update, Co-
update.

INTRODUCTION

Biometrics refers to the automatic identification of human beings based on their physical and/or
behavioural characteristics[23](Bio=life+metrics=measurement). Nowadays biometric is more
commonly related to Information Technology, consisting in electronic identification of human
beings based on their physical or behavioural characteristics. These characteristics present some
specific properties such as, uniqueness and persistency, making them suitable for this kind of
task.A number of biometric modalities have been proposed such as Fingerprints, Face, Iris, Retina,
Hand geometry, Signature, Voice, Keystroke dynamics etc., are investigated. Each has its
strengths and limitations depending on the various levels of discrimination ability, robustness,
usability, intrusiveness etc.

Biometric authentication systems are used for personal identifications in which Biometric trait like
Fingerprint is commonly used. In case of personal identification an individual, usually named as
user is enrolled into the system by submitting his/her Fingerprints. These Fingerprints are captured
using Biometric sensors as image. Thesecaptured Fingerprint images are processed to extract some
unique features in the Fingerprints and these extracted features are called templates. These
extracted templates are stored in the database as reference templates to be used during the
operational time for authentication of users. During the operation time, the individual who wants
to be authenticatedsubmits/inputs the Fingerprints to identify. A matching process is performed
during the operation to match the submitted/input Fingerprints with the stored templates in the
database. After the process, the matching algorithm produces the output called matching score,
usually a real value in the interval (0,1). The matching score measures the level of similarity
between an input Fingerprint samples and the stored Fingerprint templates in the database. The
decision is based on the matching score value compared with some threshold value, If the score is
higher than threshold, the identity is authenticated and the individual is classied as a genuine
user, otherwise the user is classied as an impostor [1]. A biometric authentication system can be
easily referred to a pattern recognition system based on template matching [2]. The matching score
obtained by the algorithm is depends on the quality of the templates stored in the database during
the enrolment and of the quality of the input templates extracted during the operational time. If any
variation in the input Fingerprint templates during the operational time, results in poor matching
score which may leads to wrong identity or rejecting the identity of the same user, it is typically
characterized by the False Acceptance Rate (FAR) and False Rejection Rate (FRR). The FAR is
the percentage of impostors wrongly accepted, the FRR is the percentage of genuine users wrongly
rejected.

In real operational environment as pointed out by [17]Uludag et al. (Uludag et al.2004) the
Fingerprint images captured can exhibit substantial variations, namely, a large intra-class
variations due to variations of many factors like environmental conditions, aging of biometric
traits, interaction variation of user with the sensors and user working conditions etc. These
situations makes the templets captured/acquired during the enrolment time leads to poorly match
with the templets captured during the operational time, which results poor performance of
Biometric systems.

Hence, it is necessary to address these situations by designing, developing and commercializing

Biometric systems which works under all conditions to provide high accuracy against the
changesin finger conditions and which does not degrade with the performance, whenever the
Biometric images captured varies due to environmental conditions during the operational time.

The finger surface condition changes depending on many factors such as:
Climate conditions- Temperature, Humidity, Weather.
Physical conditions Cuts, Working in rough conditions.
Personal conditions Aging, Skin problems

Among many Biometric modalities, Fingerprints are considered nowadays as one of the most
reliable biometric characteristic forhuman recognition due to their individuality, persistence,
usability and affordability. A fingerprint consists basically as a pattern of ridges and valleys in the
surface of the finger which is considered as one of the unique Biometric features.

The performance of Biometric recognition systemcan degrade quickly when the input biometric
traits exhibit substantial variationscompared to the templates collected during the enrolment stage
of systems user. This needs some advanced techniques like adaptive algorithms for biometrics to
update the Fingerprint templates on real-time basis to improve the performance against the
degradation for Biometric traits due to various conditions.

This paper presents Fingerprint pattern variations due environmental conditions and the methods
to improve the Fingerprint recognition system against the Fingerprint pattern variations.

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FINGERPRINT PATTERN VARIATIONS DUE TO ENVIRONMENTAL CONDITIONS

Biometric systems acquire Fingerprint image from the surface of the Fingertips for processing.
The quality of the Fingerprint image varies on many characteristics such as humidity, weather,
temperature and aging etc., which affects the performance of the Biometrics systems.

Since, the biometric systems are more widely used applications, the effects of environmental
factors and skin conditions plays as important role on the quality of the Fingerprint image due
which performance of the Biometric systems also affects. Depending on various environmental
factors and climatic conditions the fingerprint image collected from sensors are classified into,
Wet Fingerprint image and Dry fingerprint image. Some of the Fingerprints captured under
different environmental conditions from various sensors are shown in the fig.1[2].

Fig. 1. Fingerprint images from different capture sensors with different environment and skin
condition: (a) optical sensor, (b) capacitive sensor and (c) thermal sensor. [2](xie,et al, 2010b)

Wet fingerprint pattern:

When the Fingers are wet they wrinkled more and very difficult to recognise due to the acquired
image includes more dark cells.

The effect of wrinkling depends on the finger; wrinkling of the thumb seems to affect recognition
less than the other fingers with respect to Receiver OperatingCharacteristic (ROC) performance
and in terms of shift in histogram scores [7]. Asa result of Physical effects on the fingers, the
wet/wrinkledfingerprints yield lower recognition rates than dry ones. While the presence of
wrinkles is a visible phenomena in these images. Here we consider some of the effects that might
be leading to decreased performance in pressed images and present qualitative observations from
this study.

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1. Clumping of skin causes u-shaped artefacts Figure2(b) shows this effect in which clumping
leads to a spurious light U-shaped curve in the image that is transversal to the fingerprint ridge. In
turn, this leads to spurious minutiae. The commercial algorithm was fairly robust when these
clumping do not occur near a core or delta point.

2. Cuts already present become more prominent. Figure2presents air images of a wet and dry
finger with small surface cuts, and the cuts are more prominent in the wet image. These lead to
spurious minutiae which may lead to lower scores depending on the matching method used.

3. Thickening of ridges The ridges become thicker and the label of the minutiae type (bifurcation
vs ending) returned by the minutiae detector might change. Sometimes, there is a significant shift
in the location of the minutiae.

4. Moving apart of minutiae The non-linear distortion of the skin is due to the surface profile
change and subsequent pressing on the platen. This leads to regions of the print where the minutiae
move closer together while in other regions the minutiae move further apart.

Figure 2: Skin gets clumped in certain places and may lead to misfiring of the minutiae detector.
Here, we see an example of a u-shaped curve, which is the downward sloping white curve in the
circled region of the Wet image [7]. (a) Dry (b) Wet

Methods to address this issue is to address the first challenge, i.e. experiments were carried for
classifying wrinkled versus non wrinkled fingerprints. With reference to [7] considered raw RGB
air images rather than the pressed images and made a decision using a linear SVM[6]. The feature
vector consists ofthe standard deviation of 10 sub-bands (3-level decomposition) of discrete
wavelet transformed image (Haar wavelet). This method (described in reference [7]) attempts to
capture the essential difference between wrinkled and unwrinkled air images through a wavelet
representation. The frequencies present in wrinkledfingers are different because of the low-
frequency folds on top of the high frequency ridge-valley patterns. The air images of the highly
wrinkled fingers are used for positive (wet) and negative (dry) training samples. It has been
understood [7] that a separate set is used for evaluation of the classifier. In total, the 555 images
each of wrinkled and unwrinkled air images were used. When tested, this simple classifier was
accurate 84.25% of the time[7].

Dry fingerprint pattern

When the Fingers are dry the image includes too many light cells which will be marked for
operator visual cue.

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 Figure 3a. Neutral Fingerprint Images Figure3b. Dry Fingerprint Images

In general[9], the fingerprint image quality relies on the clearness of separated ridges by valleys
and the uniformity of the separation. A fingerprint image changes in many ways because of the
changes in environmental conditions such as temperature, humidity and pressure. The overall
quality of the fingerprint depends greatly on the condition of the skin [2]. Dry skin tends to
causeinconsistent contact of the finger ridges with the scanners platen surface, causing broken
ridges and many white pixels replacing ridge structure.. Figure 3a and 3b shows neutral and dry
Fingerprint images, respectively.

Neutral image: in general, it has no special properties such as dry. It does not have to
befiltered.
Dry image: The ridges are scratchy locally and there are many white pixels in the ridges.

To solve such problems, pre-processing method is proposed that is suitable for dry fingerprint, and
provides sufficiently high identification accuracy. The proposed method [9] enhances dry
fingerprints by extractingcentre lines of ridges and removes white pixels in ridges and maintains
the structure of the fingerprint.

Hence with respect to above discussed problems the fingerprint pattern varies due to temperature,
humidity, weather etc. So it needs to address for better recognition under these circumstances.

METHODS TO IMPROVE THE FINGERPRINT RECOGNITION SYSTEM AGAINST

THE FINGERPRINT PATTERN VARIATIONS

Fingerprint recognition is important for identification. Since the fingerprint pattern are varying due
to variation is season, aging,etc., there are different methods evolved for better
identification/recognition. These methods are basically to address the variation in fingerprint
patterns to get better identification. Some of the methods used includesnon-automated methods,
automated methods and Adaptive methods. Non automated methods are doing multiple
(re)enrolment sessions, use of multiple templates. Automated methods include Image
enhancement, Noise reduction and Adaptive methods include template update.

Non automated methods

Multiple (re)enrolment sessions

Using multiple (re)enrolment sessions, separated by a given interval of time, can surely help in
tracking the temporal variations of biometric traits of an individual.But frequent re-enrolment
sessions are expensive, and such a systems administration policy can be difficult to adopt. In
addition, some temporary variations (e.g., cuts on fingerprints) could fall in the time interval
between two enrolment sessions.

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In this case, the systems adaptation would fail, or should be delayed to the nextEnrolment session,
supposed that such temporary variations of biometric trait are still present. It is in fact easy to see
that the intra-class variability of a biometric trait can be extremely large also in the stationary case.
Thus collecting a representative training set can anyway require an effort of the administrator and
the enrolled users, a storage capability, a length of the enrolment session, etc., which are not
compatible with the requirements of many applications.It also creates loop holes such as
misleading people for duping or wrong identity, fraudulent activity, impersonation etc. Usually
finger print has to be collected once for lifetime which serves as reference for many things. One of
the examplesis Aadharcard, Government of India project.

Multiple templates
In order to account for the variations of users biometrics, multiple templatesassociated, for
example, impression of a finger in different angle can be collected during the enrolment session
and stored in the users gallery or database. However, this increases the size of the galleries.Hence
use of templates does not necessarily solve the problem of the large intra-class variability. In fact
some of the above mentioned variations are due to the non-stationary nature of the stochastic
process generating the biometric patterns, i.e. due to the fact that the acquired biometric patterns
can change over the time. It is nearly impossible to capture examples of such temporal variations
during a single enrolment session over a short period of time.

Automated Methods

Image enhancement
Principle objective of Image enhancement is to process an image so that result is more suitablethan
original image for specific application. Digital image enhancement techniques provide amultitude
of choices for improving the visual quality of images[13].

A fundamental problem in image processing is to remove the additive white Gaussian noise
(AWGN) without blurring the fine details of the images. So we need an enhancement algorithm
which will improve the clarity of the ridge/valley structures.
Spatial Domain Techniques:
Spatial domain techniques directly deal with the image pixels. The pixel values are manipulated to
achieve desired enhancement[16]. Spatial domain techniques like the logarithmic transforms,
power law transforms, histogram equalization, are based on the direct manipulation of the pixels in
the image. Spatial techniques are particularly useful for directly altering the grey level values of
individual pixels and hence the overall contrast of the entire image. But they usually enhance the
whole image in a uniform manner which in many cases produces undesirable results [10]. It is not
possible to selectively enhance edges or other required information effectively. Techniques like
histogram equalization are effective in many images
Frequency Domain Techniques
Frequency domain techniques are based on the manipulation of the orthogonal transform of the
image rather than the image itself. Frequency domain techniques are suited for processing the
image according to the frequency content [11]. The principle behind the frequency domain
methods of image enhancement consists of computing a 2-D discrete unitary transform of the
image, for instance the 2-D DFT, manipulating the transform coefficients by an operator M, and
then performing the inverse transform. The orthogonal transform of the image has two components
magnitude and phase. The magnitude consists of the frequency content of the image. The phase is
used to restore the image back to the spatial domain [10]. The usual orthogonal transforms are

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discrete cosine transform, discrete Fourier transform, Hartley Transform etc.The transform domain
enables operation on the frequency content of the image, and therefore high frequency content
such as edges and other subtle information can easily be enhanced.

ADAPTIVE BIOMETRIC SYSTEM

The term adaptive biometric systems refer to biometric recognition systems in which an algorithm
aimed to follow variations of the Fingerprint patterns due to Environmental factors[29]. System
can be updated to the latest fingerprint data andhence system can keep up with changes in the
finger surface. Few Methods are proposed for the same[29], those are:

Template update methods

Template update methods continuously adapt user templates during the operation to the intra-class
variations of the input biometric data based on learning methodologies like supervised and semi-
supervised learning. There are different types of template update methods.

Self-update method
The state-of-art "self-update" techniques can be regarded as based on the concept of "self-training"
in the semi-supervised learning theory. Self-update method update the templates to the intra class
variations of the input data using their own knowledge derived through current enrolled templates
[26][25].The self-update is based on the concept of "self-training" in the semi-supervised learning
theory. Specically,these systems operate by iteratively adding condently classied unlabelled
input data to the template gallery set of the respective user.The mutual complementary help of
both the matchers is used to update the system. Specically one matcher operating at high
condence helps other to identify "difficult patterns".

Co-update method
In case ofco-update method, two matchers are trained with an initial template for each user/client.
During the online operation of the biometric system, a batch of "unlabelled" data is acquired. Each
matcher is applied to such unlabelled set individually. Unlabelled samples considered as "highly
genuine" by one matcher together with the corresponding complementary sample of another trait,
are used to update the template set of the related claimed identity. Both the matchers are re-trained
with this augmented template set, and the process is repeated untila specic stop criteria is
met[27]. This technique for updating using complimentary biometrics is based on the "co-training"
concept of semi-supervised machine learning theory [24][28].
In co-update method proposed in [27], samples recognized as "highly genuine" by one of the
available matchers togethe rwith the corresponding sample of the complementary trait are always
fused with the template set of the respective client, as usually done in self update technique. On the
other hand, the hypothesis about co-update is that it can capture "large" intra-class variations,
thanks to the complementary biometric.

Online finger print template improvement algorithm

This method improves the reliability of a fingerprint template by using weighted averaging over all
matched fingerprints that a fingerprint verification system receives.

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CONCLUSION

The research field of adaptive biometrics is just moving its first steps, and it is still in its
infancy,even though some attempts are made to implement adaptive biometric systems using many
methods. We are still lacking the clear view ofthe state of the art and a precise formulation of the
design problem of an adaptivebiometric system. The main challenge to implement Adaptive
Biometric system is the non-availability of Fingerprint images over a large period of time for any
specific user or user groups. Study has to be conducted on large Fingerprint data set collected over
a period of time under different environmental conditions on real-time basis. This study will
support to improve the automatic template update algorithms to achieve better results from
Adaptive biometric systems.

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