  Contactless fingerprint identification has emerged as an reliable and user
friendly alternative for the personal identification in a range of e-business
and law-enforcement applications. It is however quite known from the literature
that the contactless fingerprint images deliver remarkably low matching
accuracies as compared with those obtained from the contact-based fingerprint
sensors. This paper develops a new approach to significantly improve
contactless fingerprint matching capabilities available today. We
systematically analyze the extent of complimentary ridge-valley information and
introduce new approaches to achieve significantly higher matching accuracy over
state-of-art fingerprint matchers commonly employed today. We also investigate
least explored options for the fingerprint color-space conversions, which can
play a key-role for more accurate contactless fingerprint matching. This paper
presents experimental results from different publicly available contactless
fingerprint databases using NBIS, MCC and COTS matchers. Our consistently
outperforming results validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach for
more accurate contactless fingerprint identification.
