A Customized Semantic Segmentation Network for the Fingerprint Singular Point Detection

As one of the most important and obvious global features for fingerprints, the singular point plays an essential role in fingerprint registration and fingerprint classification. To date, the singular point detection methods in the literature can be generally divided into two categories: methods based on traditional digital image processing and those on deep learning. Generally speaking, the former requires a high-precision fingerprint orientation field for singular point detection, while the latter just needs the original fingerprint image without preprocessing. Unfortunately, detection rates of these existing methods, either of the two categories above, are still unsatisfactory, especially for the low-quality fingerprint. Therefore, regarding singular point detection as a semantic segmentation of the small singular point area completely and directly, we propose a new customized convolutional neural network called SinNet for segmenting the accurate singular point area, followed by a simple and fast post-processing to locate the singular points quickly. The performance evaluation conducted on the publicly Singular Points Detection Competition 2010 (SPD2010) dataset confirms that the proposed method works best from the perspective of overall indexes. Especially, compared with the state-of-art algorithms, our proposal achieves an increase of 10% in the percentage of correctly detected fingerprints and more than 16% in the core detection rate.