On the Impact of Tattoos on Hand Recognition.

From Native Americans, who used tattoos as a way of seducing the opposite sex, to prisoners in the last century, who were identified by tattooed numbers, tattoos have been used for many years for a variety of purposes. Nowadays, tattoos express affiliation or beliefs and can therefore serve as complementary information to identify individuals. To support forensic investigations, hand-based biometrics have emerged as a promising technology to recognise individuals. As several statistics have reported an increase in the use of tattoos on hands, in this paper, we investigate the impact of tattoos on the performance of state-of-the-art hand recognition systems. To this end, we first propose a method for generating semi-synthetic tattooed hands. A benchmark is then performed for tattooed and non-tattooed hands. Experimental results computed on a freely available database showed that, although in some cases the use of tattoos assists hand recognition, the observed trend is a deterioration of recognition accuracy, indicating the sensitivity of hand recognition systems to tattoos.