*Article* **A Fingerprint Matching Algorithm Using the Combination of Edge Features and Convolution Neural Networks**

**Andreea-Monica Dincă Lăzărescu 1,2, Simona Moldovanu 1,3 and Luminita Moraru 1,4,\***


**Abstract:** This study presents an algorithm for fingerprint classification using a CNN (convolutional neural network) model and making use of full images belonging to four digital databases. The main challenge that we face in fingerprint classification is dealing with the low quality of fingerprints, which can impede the identification process. To overcome these restrictions, the proposed model consists of the following steps: a preprocessing stage which deals with edge enhancement operations, data resizing, data augmentation, and finally a post-processing stage devoted to classification tasks. Primarily, the fingerprint images are enhanced using Prewitt and Laplacian of Gaussian filters. This investigation used the fingerprint verification competition with four databases (FVC2004, DB1, DB2, DB3, and DB4) which contain 240 real fingerprint images and 80 synthetic fingerprint images. The real images were collected using various sensors. The innovation of the model is in the manner in which the number of epochs is selected, which improves the performance of the classification. The number of epochs is defined as a hyper-parameter which can influence the performance of the deep learning model. The number of epochs was set to 10, 20, 30, and 50 in order to keep the training time at an acceptable value of 1.8 s/epoch, on average. Our results indicate the overfitting of the model starting with the seventh epoch. The accuracy varies from 67.6% to 98.7% for the validation set, and between 70.2% and 75.6% for the test set. The proposed method achieved a very good performance compared to the traditional hand-crafted features despite the fact that it used raw data and it does not perform any handcrafted feature extraction operations.

**Keywords:** convolutional neural networks; fingerprint images; data augmentation; fingerprint classification
