  Latent fingerprint has the practical value to identify the suspects who have
unintentionally left a trace of fingerprint in the crime scenes. However,
designing a fully automated latent fingerprint matcher is a very challenging
task as it needs to address many challenging issues including the separation of
overlapping structured patterns over the partial and poor quality latent
fingerprint image, and finding a match against a large background database that
would have different resolutions. Currently there is no fully automated latent
fingerprint matcher available to the public and most literature reports have
utilized a specialized latent fingerprint matcher COTS3 which is not accessible
to the public. This will make it infeasible to assess and compare the relevant
research work which is vital for this research community. In this study, we
target to develop a fully automated latent matcher for adaptive detection of
the region of interest and robust matching of latent prints. Unlike the
manually conducted matching procedure, the proposed latent matcher can run like
a sealed black box without any manual intervention. This matcher consists of
the following two modules: (i) the dictionary learning-based region of interest
(ROI) segmentation scheme; and (ii) the genetic algorithm-based minutiae set
matching unit. Experimental results on NIST SD27 latent fingerprint database
demonstrates that the proposed matcher outperforms the currently public
state-of-art latent fingerprint matcher.
