The Quality of Fingerprint Scanners and its Impact on the Accuracy of Fingerprint Recognition Algorithms

It is well-known that in any biometric systems the quality of the input data has a strong impact on the accuracy that the system may provide. The quality of the input depends on several factors, such as: the quality of the acquisition device, the intrinsic quality of the biometric trait, the current conditions of the biometric trait, the environment, the correctness of user interaction with the device, etc. Much research is being carried out to quantify and measure the quality of biometric data. This paper focuses on the quality of fingerprint scanners and its aim is twofold: i) measuring the correlation between the different characteristics of a fingerprint scanner and the performance they can assure; ii) providing practical ways to measure such characteristics.