  Prevailing evaluations of fingerprint recognition systems have been performed
as end-to-end black-box tests of fingerprint identification or authentication
accuracy. However, performance of the end-to-end system is subject to errors
arising in any of its constituent modules, including: fingerprint scanning,
preprocessing, feature extraction, and matching. Conversely, white-box
evaluations provide a more granular evaluation by studying the individual
sub-components of a system. While a few studies have conducted stand-alone
evaluations of the fingerprint reader and feature extraction modules of
fingerprint recognition systems, little work has been devoted towards white-box
evaluations of the fingerprint matching module. We report results of a
controlled, white-box evaluation of one open-source and two
commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) minutiae-based matchers in terms of their
robustness against controlled perturbations (random noise and non-linear
distortions) introduced into the input minutiae feature sets. Our white-box
evaluations reveal that the performance of fingerprint minutiae matchers are
more susceptible to non-linear distortion and missing minutiae than spurious
minutiae and small positional displacements of the minutiae locations.
