A comparative study on Match-on-Card fingerprint matching algorithms using the ISO/IEC 19794-2:2011 format

Abstract

South Africa introduced smart ID cards in 2013 for identification and authentication of South African citizens. This came as an improvement on the old green bar-coded ID book in which authentication was not secure enough. However, the use of the smart-card for authentication comes with new problems. The minutia points that are stored in the smart-card, due to standardisation, appear to cause accuracy problems when used with on-card minutiae comparison algorithms. This study set out to investigate how the compact-card and record formats of minutia points affect the comparison accuracy and to also find out an algorithm that performs better with the minutiae format developed for use in smart-cards. This was followed by identification of a problem which had not been studied in depth before, pertaining to the formats of minutia points used for on-card comparison. The methodology of the study is presented and algorithm designs are presented. An analysis of variance is also shown for the analysis of minutia points, and in doing so it was revealed that the minutia points are not significantly different from one another; although differences exist. This led to a detailed study of the MOC algorithms, where two algorithms were selected due to their basic structure that separated the algorithms. The two categories of matching algorithms used are the local-features and the global-features based algorithms. The nearest-neighbourhood algorithm and the alignment algorithm fall into these categories respectively. These matching algorithms were implemented and also verified to ensure that they are within their specifications. In addition to implementing matching algorithms, the minutia points were also encoded in the 3-byte and 5-byte formats. The results showed that the template does affect the accuracy and the effect is not the same on each of the algorithms. However, through manipulation of the resolutions that cause some loss of accuracy, the algorithms' performance with 3-byte can be significantly improved.