Real-time three-dimensional fingerprint acquisition via a new photometric stereo means

A real-time means for three-dimensional (3-D) fingerprint acquisition is presented. The system is configured with only one camera and some white light-emitting diode lamps. The reconstruction is performed based on the principle of photometric stereo. In the algorithm, a two-layer Hanrahan–Krueger model is proposed to represent the finger surface reflectance property instead of the traditional Lambert model. By the proposed lighting direction calibration and the nonuniform lighting correction methods, surface normal at each image point can be accurately estimated by solving a nonlinear optimization problem. Finally, a linear normal transformation is implemented for the enhancement of 3-D models. The experiments are implemented with real finger and palm prints, and the results are also compared with traditional means to show its feasibility and improvement in the reconstruction accuracy.