A Constrained Fingerprint Generation Scheme for Latent Fingerprint Enhancement

Latent fingerprint enhancement is an essential preprocessing step for latent fingerprint identification. Most latent fingerprint enhancement methods try to restore corrupted gray ridges/valleys. In this paper, we propose a new method that formulates latent fingerprint enhancement as a constrained fingerprint generation problem within a generative adversarial network (GAN) framework. We name the proposed network FingerGAN. It can enforce its generated fingerprint (i.e, enhanced latent fingerprint) indistinguishable from the corresponding ground truth instance in terms of the fingerprint skeleton map weighted by minutia locations and the orientation field regularized by the FOMFE model. Because minutia is the primary feature for fingerprint recognition and minutia can be retrieved directly from the fingerprint skeleton map, we offer a holistic framework that can perform latent fingerprint enhancement in the context of directly optimizing minutia information. This will help improve latent fingerprint identification performance significantly. Experimental results on two public latent fingerprint databases demonstrate that our method outperforms the state of the arts significantly.