A Universal Latent Fingerprint Enhancer Using Transformers
Andre Brasil Vieira Wyzykowski Anil K. Jain
Forensic science heavily relies on analyzing latent fingerprints, which are
crucial for criminal investigations. However, various challenges, such as
background noise, overlapping prints, and contamination, make the
identification process difficult. Moreover, limited access to real crime scene
and laboratory-generated databases hinders the development of efficient
recognition algorithms. This study aims to develop a fast method, which we call
ULPrint, to enhance various latent fingerprint types, including those obtained
from real crime scenes and laboratory-created samples, to boost fingerprint
recognition system performance. In closed-set identification accuracy
experiments, the enhanced image was able to improve the performance of the
MSU-AFIS from 61.56\% to 75.19\% in the NIST SD27 database, from 67.63\% to
77.02\% in the MSP Latent database, and from 46.90\% to 52.12\% in the NIST
SD302 database. Our contributions include (1) the development of a two-step
latent fingerprint enhancement method that combines Ridge Segmentation with
UNet and Mix Visual Transformer (MiT) SegFormer-B5 encoder architecture, (2)
the implementation of multiple dilated convolutions in the UNet architecture to
capture intricate, non-local patterns better and enhance ridge segmentation,
and (3) the guided blending of the predicted ridge mask with the latent
fingerprint. This novel approach, ULPrint, streamlines the enhancement process,
addressing challenges across diverse latent fingerprint types to improve
forensic investigations and criminal justice outcomes.