Fingerprint Template Ageing Revisited - It’s the Quality, Stupid!
Simon Kirchgasser, Andreas Uhl, Katy Castillo-Rosado, David Estevez-Bresó, Emilio Rodriguez-Hernandez, José Hernández-Palancar · 2018
Several studies conducted on time-span separated fingerprint datasets revealed recognition performance degradation as compared to commonly achieved accuracies. The reported accuracy reduction is mainly caused by a shift of the genuine score distributions towards the impostor ones. This fact raised discussions about the reasons behind eventual template ageing effects in fingerprint recognition. Analysing the only publicly available time-separated fingerprint dataset (CASIA Fingerprint Subject Ageing Version 1.0), it is demonstrated in the current study that (i) advances in recognition technology mitigate the earlier observed decrease in recognition accuracy and (ii) advances in fingerprint quality assessment now lead to the conclusion that it is indeed fingerprint quality which causes the earlier observed recognition impact. Current results on this dataset do not suggest the existence of a fingerprint template ageing effect.