A classification method of fingerprint quality based on
neural network
Xiu-kun Yang
Harbin Engineering University
Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
Harbin,China
yangxiukun@hrbeu.edu.cn
Abstract—The performance of an automatic fingerprint
authentication system relies heavily on the quality of fingerprint
images. Besides, the effective evaluation and quality classification
of fingerprint images is of paramount significance in the
applicability research of fingerprint recognition algorithm. In
this paper, an effective quality classification method for
fingerprint image based on neural network is proposed. The
quality indexes comprise effective area, energy concentration,
spatial consistency and directional contrast, and neural network
is applied to achieve quality classification of fingerprint images.
The experimental results show the method proposed could
improve fingerprint image quality classification accuracy more
effectively than individual quality index threshold segmentation
and linear weighted sum method.
Keywords- fingerprint classification;feature extraction; quality
evaluation; neural network
I. INTRODUCTION
Due to its uniqueness and persistence[1], the technology of
fingerprint has become the most mature biometrics and is
widely applied to ID confirm system. Fingerprint image quality
considerably affects the performance of fingerprint
identification system, so it is useful and necessary for
evaluating the collected fingerprint images quality in the
fingerprint recognition system.
The existing methods for evaluating fingerprint image
quality can be divided into two categories:
(1) Local evaluation method usually divides a fingerprint
image into non-overlapping sub-blocks which are classified
into different quality groups, and then extracts features of each
sub-block in order to produce local quality measurements.
These measures can be defined as a proportion of high quality
blocks or low quality blocks, or the combination of high-low
quality blocks. Chen[2] proposed a local quality index which
measures the local coherence of the intensity gradient,
reflecting the clarity of local ridge-valley direction in each
block. The method descried in[3] classified blocks into
“directional” and “non-directional”, if the proportion of
directional blocks is higher than a threshold, then the image is
considered to be of high quality whereas the image is consider
to be of poor quality.
978-1-61284-774-0/11/$26.00 ©2011 IEEE
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Yang Luo
Harbin Engineering University
Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
Harbin, China
luoyang811@yahoo.cn
(2) Global evaluation method extracts global features from
fingerprint images as quality measurements. Ratha and Bolle[4]
chose two bandwidths subjectively from a wavelet compressed
fingerprint image to compute the energy distribution rate. Zia[5]
evaluated the overall quality of fingerprint image by computing
and analyzing effective area, Fourier spectrum and contrast
entropy.
At present, people usually combine the two methods to
calculate fingerprint image quality by using various features
weighted method. But the fingerprint image quality does not
have linear relationship with various features scores, so far
there is no uniform standard of how to determine suitable
various features thresholds and how to select weights of
various features. For the above-mentioned problems, this paper
suggests a method combining features extraction and neural
network to classify fingerprint images.
II. THE ALGORITHM OF BP NEURAL NETWORK
BP neural network[6,7] is a one-way transmission networks
to the multilayer, is of great learning, training several times
after the network has a good ability to predict. The network
consists of three layers: the input layer, the hidden layer, and
the output layer. The structure of multilayer feed-forward BP
neural network is shown in Figure 1.
Error back-propagation
input layer hide layer output layer
signal flow
Figure 1. The structure of multilayer feed-forward BP neural network.
The learning process of BP neural network algorithm
consists of two phases as follow
 (1) Information transmission is that it calculates the actual of high quality fingerprint image is more concentrated, whereas
output value of each unit storey by storey when input the energy of low quality fingerprint image is dispersed. The
information transfers from input layer to hide layer. power spectrums of high-low quality fingerprint images are
shown in Figure 2.
(2) Error Back Propagation is that it modifies weight
factors from the output layer forward step by step using the
gradient descent method to minimize the output error signal.
Because of higher learning accuracy and good nonlinear
processing power, BP neural network is widely used in pattern
recognition, classification and other fields.

III. QUALITY FEATURE EXTRACTION

Quality features are used to evaluate the quality of (a) (b)
fingerprint image, and different feature can only reflect Figure 2. power spectrums of high-low quality fingerprint images: (a) power
fingerprint image quality in one way. There are lots of reasons spectrum of high quality fingerprint image; (b) power spectrum of low quality
for the differences of fingerprint image quality, so effective fingerprint image.
area, energy concentration, spatial consistency and directional We use a set of Butterworth low-pass filters to extract the
contrast are extracted as quality indexes to evaluate fingerprint energy from power spectrum of fingerprint images. The
image quality in this paper. Butterworth filter function is defined as follow
A. Effective Area 1
Effective area is an important parameter to evaluate the H (u , v | m, n ) =
1 u − a 2 v −b 2 n
(4)
fingerprint image quality. Effective area is so small that it 1+ 2 n (( ) +( ) )
m M N
could lead to lose some detail information which reduces the
matching accuracy. The gradient of fingerprint image where (u ,v ) is the pixel index in the power spectrum and
foreground is big, whereas the gradient of fingerprint image ( a ,b ) is the location of the center of the power spectrum. The
background is small[8]. In this paper, a method based on Butterworth function generates a set of low-pass filters with the
gradient threshold segmentation is proposed to distinguish cutoff frequency given by m and the filter order given by n .
fingerprint image foreground from background. A fingerprint
image is divided into a set of non-overlapping blocks. T ( m,n ) We can get a total of T equally spaced band pass filters Rt
is the gradient of the ( m,n )th block, and the output flag matrix by taking two consecutive Butterworth functions, and the
after segmentation is defined as energy concentration in the t −th band is computed by
N −1 M −1
­0, | T(m, n) |> A (1) E = ¦ ¦ Rt (u ,v ) P (u ,v ) (5)
S(m, n) = ® t
¯1, | T (m, n) |< A u =0 v =0

where A is the gradient threshold, 0 represents foreground and the entropy of energy concentration is defined as
area, and 1 represents background area. The definition of T −1
effective area Q1 is that the number of foreground blocks NFA E = − ¦ Pt log Pt (6)
t =0
divides the number of whole blocks NC
where Pt is the normalized energy of the t −th band.
NFA
Q1= (2) Finally, energy concentration score is computed by
NC
Q2 = log T − E (7)
B. Energy Concentration
The two-dimensional Discrete Fourier Transformation C. Spatial Consistency
˄DFT˅of a fingerprint image I of size M × N at the spatial A fingerprint image is divided into a set of non-overlapping
2π k 2π l blocks of size w×w . The gradient of the gray level intensity at
frequency ( , ) is given by
M N x y T
the site from block B is defined as g s = ( g s , g s ) . The
M −1 N −1 ux vy
− j 2π ( + ) covariance matrix of the gradient vectors[9] for all sites in this
F (u , v ) = ¦ ¦ I ( x, y )e M N (3)
x =0 y = 0 block is given by
Although DFT produces a complex-valued output, only the 1 ªj j12 º
J = ¦ g s g Ts = « 11 » (8)
power spectrum P (u ,v ) ≡ F (u ,v ) 2 is often used as it contains 2
w s∈B ¬ j21 j22 ¼
most of the geometric structure of an image. The power
the eigenvalues of the above matrix are that
spectrum is defined as an annular band with radius from ridges
minimum frequency to ridges maximum frequency. The energy

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 1 direction contrast of each block in this way and direction
λ1 = (trace ( J ) + trace 2 ( J )− 4det( J ) ) (9) contrast score is defined as :
2
N
1 Q4 = ¦ Dk (16)
λ2 = (trace ( J ) − trace2 ( J )− 4det( J ) ) (10) k =1
2 We have extracted four quality indexes and normalized
2 these indexes on the database so that the values lie between
where trace ( J ) = j11 + j22 , det( J ) = j11 j22 − j12 . The
zero and one.
normalized coherence measure is given by
(λ −λ )2 ( j − j )2 + 4 j12 2 IV. THE SIMULATION RESULTS AND ANALYSIS
k = 1 2 2 = 11 22 (11)
( λ1 + λ2 ) ( j11 + j22 ) 2 In this paper, fingerprint images are divided into high
quality fingerprint images and low quality fingerprint images
So we can get the spatial consistency of each block in this as shown in Fig4.
way and spatial consistency score is defined as follow
1 r
Q3 = ¦ w k (12)
r i =1 i i

where r is the total number of foreground blocks, and wi

is the relative weight for the i −th block.

D. Directional Contrast
The ridges of high quality fingerprint image are clear and
(a) high quality fingerprint (b) low quality fingerprint
have higher contrast. Whereas, the ridges of low quality Figure 4. high-low quality fingerprint
fingerprint image are indistinct and have lower contrast. Based We chose eight hundred images to set up fingerprint
on the characteristic, directional contrast[10] is applied to database, and the quality of these fingerprint images are mainly
evaluate fingerprint image quality. depended on the human’s subjective judgment. We formed our
A fingerprint image I is divided into a total of N non- training set with six hundred images which consisted of three
overlapping blocks of size 8 × 8 . We process all pixels in each hundred high quality images and three hundred low quality
block with eight directions filter shown in Figure 3. images and the test set contained the remaining two hundred
P71 P61 P51 P41 P31 images which consisted of one hundred high quality images
and one hundred low quality images. The experimental steps
are introduced as follow
P81 P21

P12 Pij P11

a) A set of four dimensional features vetors are
P22 P82
constructed based on four quality indexes extracted from each
P32 P42 P52 P62 P72 fingerprint image;
(a) (b) b) The threshold of each quality index is determined
Figure 3. the mask and processing method of eight dircetions filter: (a) the based on minimum error decision rule to compute
mask of eight directions filter; (b) the processing method of eight directions classification accuracy of individual quality index;
filter
Using eight directions filter, we can compute each direction c) We can get a set of linear weighted sum vetors from
gray-scale value sum of neighborhood of size 5 × 5 centered at the set of four dimensinoal features vetors as follow;
each pixel in block B as follow 1 4
2 Qsum = ¦ Qi ˄17˅
Si ( x , y ) = ¦ I ( Pi j ) , i =1,2,"8 (13) 4 i =1
j =1
after sliding the filter over block B , the eight directions d) The threshold of linear weighted sum is determined
gray-scale value sum of block B can be obtained by based on minimum error decision rule to compute
8 8 classification accuracy of this method;
θi = ¦ ¦ Si ( x , y ), i =1,2,"8 (14)
x =1 y =1 e) We train BP neural network with the training set. A
and the directional contrast of block B is given by set of four dimensional features vetors exreacted from images
included in training set can be used as the input vectors of BP
Dk = θmax −θ ' , k =1,2"N (15)
k neural network, and two output are corresponding to two
where θ max is maximum gray-scale value sum in eight types;
' f) Finally, we use BP neural network to test the test set
directions of block B and the direction of θ is in a direction and compare its classification accuracy with the classification
perpendicular to the direction of θ max . So we can compute the accuracy got from individual quality index threshold
segmentation and linear weighted sum method.

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 Using effective area, energy concentration, spatial
consistency, directional contrast and linear weighted sum as
quality indexes , we can get the quality distribution maps of
these indexes respectively as shown in Figure 5.
method is higher. This is because the reasons for causing the
differences of fingerprint image quality are so many, yet
individual quality index could only reflect fingerprint image
quality in one way and multiple features could reflcet quality in
a wide range. Comparing with linear weighted sum method,
the quality classification accuracy of proposed method in this
paper is higher. It is because the inherent relationship between
these indexes and fingerprint image quality is not a linear
correlation, and we can build this nonlinear relationship by
using BP neural network . Simulation results verified that the
proposed algorithm is accurate and effective.

(a) (b)
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This paper is funded by the International Exchange
Programm of Harbin Engineering University for Innovation-
oriented Talents Cultivation; The National Science Foundation
of Heilongjiang Province under Grant 42400621-1-09130 and
the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities
under Grant HEUCFR1017.
(c) (d)
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