Contactless fingerprint is a newly developed type of fingerprint, and has gained lots of attention in recent fingerprint studies. However, most existing contactless fingerprint algorithms treat contactless fingerprints as 2D plain fingerprints, and utilize similar recognition methods as traditional contact-based 2D fingerprints. This recognition approach does not consider the modality difference between contactless and contact fingerprints, especially the intrinsic 3D characteristic of contactless fingerprints. This paper proposes a novel contactless fingerprint recognition algorithm that captures the revealed 3D feature of contactless fingerprints rather than the plain 2D feature. The proposed method first recovers 3D features from the input contactless fingerprint, including the 3D shape model and 3D fingerprint feature (minutiae, orientation, etc.). Then, a novel 3D graph matching is conducted in 3D space according to the extracted 3D feature. Our method captures the real 3D nature of contactless fingerprints as the whole feature extraction and matching algorithms are completed in real 3D space. Experiments results on contactless fingerprint databases show that the proposed method successfully improves the matching accuracy of contactless fingerprints. Exceptionally, our method performs stably across multiple poses of contactless fingerprints due to 3D graph matching, which is a great advantage compared to previous contactless fingerprint recognition algorithms.

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