2017 Fourth International Conference on Image Information Processing (ICIIP)
FKQNet: A Biometric Sample Quality Estimation
Network using Transfer Learning
1
Gaurav Jaswal, 4 Ravinder Nath 2
Divyansh Aggarwal
Department of Electrical Engineering Department of Computer Science Engineering School of Electrical and Computing
National Institute of Technology Indian Institute of Technology
Hamirpur, India-177005 Jodhpur, India-342037
Email: (gauravjaswal,nath)@nith.ac.in Email: aggarwal.1@iitj.ac.in
Abstract—It is worth mentioning that the use of image
quality assessment can play a significant role to achieve the
performance improvement for biometric recognition frameworks.
The aforementioned works and other analogue studies in low-
resolution finger knuckle images have claimed that the precise
detection of true features is difficult from poor quality images
and the main reason for matching errors. The quality of finger
knuckle images are mainly affected by blurred lines, random
skin folds, unclear wrinkles, de-focus, poor contrast and varying
reflections produced by the camera flash. Due to the lack of
well-structured patterns as in the case of face or fingerprint
biometrics, the quality assessment of knuckle images becomes
challenging. In this paper, we have proposed a novel quality
Network (FKQNet), that classifies FKP Images based on six
different quality parameters. To the best of our knowledge this
is the first attempt, a trained Deep Learning Neural Network
has been employed to identify, estimate and quantify the quality
attributes of knuckle images. Following this, an image has been
classified into three classes viz. good, bad and average and on that
basis, the best samples are selected or low weights are assigned to
poor quality samples for further level recognition. The objective
of the proposed system is to enhance the matching performance
of biometric recognition frameworks through the use of quality
assessment of image samples. The experimental results obtained
from the publicly available finger knuckle database reveals that
the proposed method is highly competitive compared with other
state-of-the-art approaches.
Index Terms—Finger Knuckle, ResNet, Softmax, Quality
I. I NTRODUCTION
Automated biometric based authentication mechanisms have
been extensively applied in numerous security applications
like law enforcement, surveillance etc. Several biometric traits
have been investigated in the past as shown in Fig.1, but not
limited to fingerprint, face, ear, iris, and gait in order to provide
biometric security. However, hand biometric characteristics
such as hand geometry [1], palm print [2], dorsal hand vein
[3], finger dorsal knuckle [4], fingerprint [5], and finger vein
[6]) are supposedly unique and consist of stable anatomical
structures over time [7].Finger knuckle can be used even with
low resolution images to identify individuals which enhances
systems accuracy, speed and reduces the cost. Some other
factors favoring finger knuckle include lesser user cooperation,
non-intrusive and economical touch-less imaging sensors,[8].
No biometric feature can replace anyone but each one has
its specific pros and cons. Finger dorsal knuckle patterns are
978-1-5090-6734-3/17/$31.00 ©2017 IEEE 426
3
Aditya Nigam
Indian Institute of Technology
Mandi, India-175001
Email: aditya@iitmandi.ac.in
observed to be fine near PIP joint because they can not be used
for any physical activity and hence are less prone to injuries.
Thus the features of finger knuckle have potential of being
employed in wide range of security applications.
Problem Statement : The quality of images contribute
immensely to their recognition performance and often have
inevitably wide distribution of quality that depends on the
the sensor and source of sample. Hence quality assessment
should be done during early phases such as data acquisition
so that one can discard the bad quality images and recapture
them. The term ’quality’ is the degree to which a biometric
sample fulfills the requirements for an anticipated application.
Output of different quality metrics can be combined together
in various manners, since using the same quality metrics in
different applications is challenging. Also quality parameters
can reveal the type of deficiency which can be used to apply
suitable enhancement techniques to reduce its effect. The bio-
metric data quality facilitates the benchmarking and fine tuning
of various parameters to improve the system performance.
The quality of biometric images specifically finger knuckle is
dependent almost on major lines, wrinkles, ridge lines, focus,
contrast and illumination and reflections.
Related Work : Most of existing quality assessment ap-
proaches are based on two factors: Knowledge of complete
reference image which is known as ’full reference’ quality
assessment, and another is blind” quality assessment approach
when no reference image is available. A quality analysis for
ideal biometrics such as iris, face, and fingerprint has been
studied by many researchers in the literature. It is evident
that quality of a biometric sample impacts the performance of
recognition algorithms. In [9] authors focused on fingerprint
quality assessment and determined quality metric for different
publicly known data sets. For fingerprint NIST based nf iq
tool [10] is publicly available for quality estimation. In [11] an
iris classification method based on seven quality attributes was
presented. In [9] a facial quality metric including five different
attributes is evaluated using Deep Convolution Neural Network
that select images based on their quality for recognition. In
[12] a weight average method is used to fuse the quality
scores of various attributes for quality check of dorsal hand
vein biometrics. But, not much amount of work is reported
in quality assessment of palm and finger knuckle images.
 2017 Fourth International Conference on Image Information Processing (ICIIP)
In [13] palm print image quality is analyzed in terms of
illumination, and biometric system is trained to reject the
image of poor illumination. In [14] six quality parameters are
given to quantify the quality of finger knuckle images. Authors
used a trained SVM classifier to predict the quality of finger
knuckle image using those quality attributes. In [15] the use of
palm print image quality assessment is motivated for liveness
detection to differentiate between real and fake samples.
Contribution : In this paper, a blind image quality assess-
ment scheme has been proposed for finger knuckle images
which presents a very low degree of complexity. Six quality
parameters are proposed along with the methods to quantify
and fuse them in order to obtain a single quality score for
each image. For this, a trained network namely, FKQnet has
been proposed which comprises of two deep learning models.
The objective of this network is to perform quality estimation
and to classify the image into one of the three categories. The
proposed system is tested on PolyU finger knuckle database.
Finally the classification accuracy using each individual qual-
ity attribute is determined over FKP images. The rest of the
paper is organized as follows: Section 2 presents the proposed
quality parameters and the methods to compute them. Section
3 discusses the detailed experimental setup and the results.
Conclusion are presented in the last section.
Fig. 1. Biometric Traits
II. P ROPOSED S YSTEM
The network proposed for the described task has been
trained in two stages. In the first stage a fine tuned version of
the ResNet model has been trained for each of the individual
quality parameters. In the second stage the feature vectors from
each of the individual quality parameters has been taken ,
merged and some classification layers have been added over
them. Then this whole model is trained in an end to end
fashion. For each of the individual quality parameters the
ResNet model which has achieved state of the art results
in the ImageNet classification challenge has been chosen as
the base model which is shown in Fig.2. The feature vector
containing 2048 neurons is extracted from the ’Flatten1’ layer
of the ResNet model and the rest of the classification layers
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are chopped off. This is done because the lower classification
layers of the ResNet models learn more global features related
to the ImageNet database but since we only require basic
features like edges etc. thus we chop off these layers. Then
it is dropped to two neurons gradually through a series of
fully connected layers. After each layer a dropout of 0.3 is
applied to avoid over-fitting. These dense layers include six
layers with 1000 , 500 , 250 , 100 , 50 and 20 neurons
respectively. Relu activation is applied over each of these dense
layers to impart regularization and to introduce non-linearity.
Finally a classification layer consisting of two neurons is added
over it with a softmax classification to classify a particular
image as good or bad based on that particular quality trait.
The above model is trained only starting from the second last
convolution layer of the Resnet model and all the layers till the
’Activation47’ layer of the Resnet model are freezed because
we need to learn only the global features of the knuckle
images and the basic local features has already been learned
by the ResNet model. One such network is trained for each
of the quality parameters.The model is then trained with the
groundtruth generated by performing 2 means clustering of
the values computed for the individual parameters using [14].
The optimizer used is Adam with a learning rate of 0.001 and
the loss considered is sparse categorical crossentropy.
A. FKQnet:Finger Knuckle Print
Let us analyze the second model. The feature vector consist-
ing of 20 neurons from the trained ResNets of the individual
quality parameters are taken and are concatenated to construct
a feature vector of 120 neurons so as to take into account
features taken from each of the individual quality parameters.
This is then dropped to 3 classes through a series of 5
dense layers with number of neurons 100, 50, 30, 15 and 3
respectively. Relu activation is applied to the output of the
first four dense layers to provide regularization and Softmax
activation is applied to the last classification layer for finding
the class probabilities. Following each of the first four dense
layers is a dropout of 0.3 to avoid over-fitting. Adam optimizer
with a learning rate of 0.003 is used to optimize the sparse
categorical Cross entropy loss. Each of the ResNets are freezed
till the ’Activation47’ layer. As shown in Fig.3, the combined
model is then trained in an end to end fashion with the
groundtruth obtained by performing 3 means clustering based
on the fused quality attribute which takes into account all the
six individual quality parameters.
B. Proposed Quality Parameters
The quality assessment of finger knuckle image is a very
tedious task because various parameters should have to ac-
knowledged together. FKP as a biometric has grown recently
therefore it lacks fully formalized quality assessment bench-
mark unlike fingerprint which consists of well structured and
organized features such as minutia ridges. In this work the
quality of finger knuckle image is computed with six main
attributes: Focus (F), Clutter (C), Spread (S), Entropy (E), Re-
flection (R), and Contrast (C). The selected quality parameters
 2017 Fourth International Conference on Image Information Processing (ICIIP)
Fig. 2. Model for each individual quality parameter
specifically tend to analyze the quality of longitudinal features
as they are more prominent in finger knuckle image. In this
work, sobel kernel (3 × 3) is used to estimate the vertically
strong edges over finger knuckle image.
[1] Focus : The defocus in an image acquisition procedure
describes the dislocation of focal point of the sensors lens at
the reference object as shown in .In a defocused image, it has
been noticed that the frequency spectra is not fine towards
high frequencies while it appears uniform for focused image.
In case of FKP, the amount of well focused area is considered
for quality assessment. To compute this, an input image is
convolved with given (6 × 6) kernel that can well approximate
the band pass characteristics. With this, we have a set of
pixels that are well focused, means the convolved value of
those pixels is more than empirically set threshold. Therefore,
the set of well focused pixels are used to constitute the most
significant region for quality assessment. Finally, focus (F) as
a quality parameter is defined as the number of well focused
vertically aligned long edge pixels.
[2] Contrast : Often the large illumination variation can
reduce the discriminative line features in FKP and result into
degradation of overall uniqueness and quality of the image.
The contrast (C) describes about the dynamic gray level range
present in the image. In this work, it is used to estimate the
uniformity in illumination in the overall FKP image. The entire
intensity level is grouped into three parts (0; 75); (76; 235);
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(236; 255). Hence, contrast as a quality attribute (C) is defined
as the number of gray scale pixels that lie in the intermediate
range of intensities (i.e (76; 235)).
[3] Reflection : It is very important to remove reflection
from the image that is caused by camera flash or lighting
source. High reflection usually creates a bright patch of very
high intensity gray values. The unique lines and creases lying
over this patch in FKP images are almost collapsed resulting
in serious quality degradation. To control the effects of high
reflection, a sample FKP image is thresholded again and
again until the most accurate reflection patch is estimated.
The thresholding procedure gets terminated when the count of
number of pixels gets saturated (i.e when the difference in the
count before and after thresholding is less than an empirically
selected value). After termination the full reflection patch is
identified as shown in Fig.4 The reflection (R) as quality
attribute is defined as the number of pixels belonging to the
reflection patch hence it is inversely proportional to the image
quality.
[4] Entropy : To compute the amount of information in
any gray scale image (I), the most common parameter is
the entropy (E). In this work, the input FKP image is first
partitioned into blocks of size 5 × 5 and the entropy is
calculated block wise (as shown in Fig). One can observe
that all these blocks are not equally important, therefore the
blocks with well focused and long vertically aligned edge
 2017 Fourth International Conference on Image Information Processing (ICIIP)
Fig. 3. Combined Model for overall Quality Estimation of Knuckle Images
pixels are considered as significant blocks. Hence, the entropy
(E) as a quality attribute is obtained by summing up the all
the entropies of significant blocks as shown in Fig.4
[5] Spread : It has been noticed that well focused structure
exists only in left or right half of most of the FKP images
as shown in Fig. However, the texture should have to be
distributed uniformly through out the whole image. The spread
(S) is defined as a quality attribute which is directly propor-
tional to the uniformity in texture distribution as shown in
Fig.4 In this work, the set of well focused pixels are clustered
using K-Means algorithm using K = 2, because FKP images
are well aligned horizontally. Then cluster point ratio and
cluster deviation standard ratio of the two clusters are used
to compute the value of S.
[6] Clutter : As it is clear that the vertical features in FKP
images are well defined. But, there are a few short vertical
edge pixels as well that are usually present due to abrupt
discontinuity in the edge structure. These pixels can degrade
the quality of the image. It basically creates false features
that can confuse any recognition algorithm. The clutter (C)
as quality parameter is defined as the ratio of long vertically
aligned strong edge pixels to the shorter ones. It is inversely
proportional to the image quality.
[7] Fused Quality Attribute : The values of all the
above described six quality parameters are computed and then
normalized using maxmin normalization.The likelihood ratio
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based fusion is used to find a fused score for all the six quality
parameters which can then be used to estimate the overall
quality of the image.
III. E XPERIMENTAL A NALYSIS
The following benchmark data set has been used to check
the quality assessment of finger knuckle images.
PolyU Finger knuckle Print Database : The database has
been developed by Biometric Research Center (UGC/CRC) at
the Hong Kong Polytechnic University and freely available for
academic, noncommercial use [17]. It contains 7920 images
in BMP image format with resolution 110 × 220. The 165
(125 : 40) individuals participated in enrollment process. For
each subject, 6 images per index/middle finger are acquired
in two different sessions (with a time gap of 14 to 96 days
between two sessions).
A. Results and Important Findings
In this work, six quality parameters are individually trained
to account for quality assessment of finger knuckle images.
The quality attributes from the randomly selected finger-
knuckle-images along with their respective true quality label
are used to train the deep Learning model. The initial clas-
sification results using reflection, ratio, and output are shown
in Fig.5 This creates a network based classifier which can be
used to predict the quality of a finger-knuckle-image using its
 2017 Fourth International Conference on Image Information Processing (ICIIP)

Fig. 4. Computation of Values for Reflection, Entropy, Spread and Clutter [16]

Fig. 5. Classification Results for Reflection, Ratio and Contrast quality parameters

quality attributes and classify the image into three classes. An TABLE I
example of classified FKP images is shown in Fig.6. From CCR% OF DIFFERENT Q UALITY PARAMETERS
Table III-A, one can see that the classification accuracy using Quality Parameter Accuracy
reflection based quality parameter has been observed superior Focus 75.63%
among other parameters. It may be possible due to presence Clutter 82.13%
of brightest region in the finger middle joint. Similarly, the Reflection 93.50%
Entropy 75.63%
other quality parameters like clutter, and contrast are also Spread 78.16%
showing satisfactory performances. It can also be observed that Contrast 82.51%
estimating the quality of an image using these three parameters Overall Classification Accuracy 86.13%
is easy manually as well. High reflection can easily be detected
from the large amount of extremely high valued pixels. Thus,
the estimation of the quality of an image based on contrast and
of sample is directly related to recognition performance. In
clutter is easy as well and hence they show promising results
this work, quality of finger knuckle is computed using six
when learned through the network.
main attributes along with Deep Learning model to quantify
and fuse them to obtain a single quality score for each image.
IV. C ONCLUSION
Finally, we classify the finger knuckle image as good or bad
With the fastest escalation in digital imaging technologies based on that particular quality trait. In future work, we will
worldwide, the image quality assessment has been becoming try to compute recognition performance over these images in
an important issue in biometric applications because quality order to establish a relationship between image quality and

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 2017 Fourth International Conference on Image Information Processing (ICIIP)

Fig. 6. Overall Quality Estimation classification results

matching performance.
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