In this paper, we introduce the Minutia Cylinder-Code (MCC): a novel representation based on 3D data structures (called cylinders), built from minutiae distances and angles. The cylinders can be created starting from a subset of the mandatory features (minutiae position and direction) defined by standards like ISO/IEC 19794-2 (2005). Thanks to the cylinder invariance, fixed-length, and bit-oriented coding, some simple but very effective metrics can be defined to compute local similarities and to consolidate them into a global score. Extensive experiments over FVC2006 databases prove the superiority of MCC with respect to three well-known techniques and demonstrate the feasibility of obtaining a very effective (and interoperable) fingerprint recognition implementation for light architectures.

Once upon a time there was a criminal; he was reading his e-mail when a banner caught his attention: low cost flights for the destination of his dreams! He had already started to book the trip when suddenly realized that, being wanted by the police, he could not use his passport without being arrested. What to do? He could not miss that opportunity, so he called a good friend and they started to think for a possible solution. Do you want to know if they succeeded? Read the rest of the paper and find it out.

The morphing attack proved to be a serious threat for modern automated border control systems where face recognition is used to link the identity of a passenger to his/her e-document. In this paper we show that by exploiting the live face image acquired at the gate, the morphed face image stored in the document can be reverted (or demorphed) enough to reveal the identity of the legitimate document owner, thus allowing the system to issue a warning. A number of practical experiments on two datasets proves the efficacy of our approach.

Although several fingerprint template protection methods have been proposed in the literature, the problem is still unsolved, since enforcing nonreversibility tends to produce an excessive drop in accuracy. Furthermore, unlike fingerprint verification, whose performance is assessed today with public benchmarks and protocols, performance of template protection approaches is often evaluated in heterogeneous scenarios, thus making it very difficult to compare existing techniques. In this paper, we propose a novel protection technique for Minutia Cylinder-Code (MCC), which is a well-known local minutiae representation. A sophisticate algorithm is designed to reverse MCC (i.e., recovering original minutiae positions and angles). Systematic experimentations show that the new approach compares favorably with state-of-the-art methods in terms of accuracy and, at the same time, provides a good protection of minutiae information and is robust against masquerade attacks.

This paper proposes a new hash-based indexing method to speed up fingerprint identification in large databases. A Locality-Sensitive Hashing (LSH) scheme has been designed relying on Minutiae Cylinder-Code (MCC), which proved to be very effective in mapping a minutiae-based representation (position/angle only) into a set of fixed-length transformation-invariant binary vectors. A novel search algorithm has been designed thanks to the derivation of a numerical approximation for the similarity between MCC vectors. Extensive experimentations have been carried out to compare the proposed approach against 15 existing methods over all the benchmarks typically used for fingerprint indexing. In spite of the smaller set of features used (top performing methods usually combine more features), the new approach outperforms existing ones in almost all of the cases.

The interest in fingerprint-based biometric systems has constantly grown in recent years and considerable efforts have been focused by both academia and industry on the development of new algorithms for fingerprint recognition. Raffaele Cappelli, Matteo Ferrara, Annalisa Franco and Davide Maltoni of the Biometric System Laboratory at the University of Bologna explain the findings of the Fingerprint Verification Competition 2006.