Fingerprint Quality of Rural Population and Impact of Multiple Scanners on Recognition

Fingerprint is a popular biometric trait for designing an automatic human recognition system. These systems are commonly benchmarked over fingerprints of the urban population whereas their practical deployment involves majority of rural population. Living standards of the rural population is not as high as urban ones. They are mostly involved in hard work and less careful about their skin conditions. Therefore, it is desirable to explore the average quality of fingerprint and the performance of automatic fingerprint recognition system for rural population. This paper analyses the (1) age-group and gender wise quality of fingerprint and (2) recognition performance under cross scanner settings. To justify the analysis, 41400 fingerprints are collected from 1150 participants living in rural areas and actively involved in physically hard work. Participants are from age group of 18 to 70 years. Samples have been collected in two phases with a gap of two months with the help of three different fingerprint scanners. Every participant has provided multiple fingerprint samples in each phase on all three scanners.