Human Footprint Biometrics for Personal Identification using Artificial Neural Networks

The philosophy of this study focuses on human footprint identification applicable for high-security applications such as the safety of public places, crime scene investigation, impostor identification, biotech labs and blue-chip labs, and identification of infants in hospitals. The paper proposes one of the low-cost hardware to scan the biometric human footprints that utilise image pre-processing and enhancement capabilities for obtaining the features. The algorithm enhances the footprint matching performance by selecting the three sets of local invariant feature detectors - histogram of gradients, maximally stable external regions, and speed up robust features; local binary pattern as texture descriptor, corner point detector, and PCA. Furthermore, descriptive statistics are generated from all the above mentioned footprint features and concatenated to create the final feature vector. The proposed footprint biometric identification will correctly identify or classify the person by training the system with patterns of the interested subjects using an artificial neural network model specially designed for this task. The proposed method gives the classification accuracy at a very encouraging level of 99.55%.