Government of the United States of America, As Represented by the Secretary of Commerce

Michael D Garris

Shahram Orandi

Stephen S Wood

John M Libert

Fred Byers

Stephen Harvey

Jin Chu Wu

Charles L Wilson

Robert A Wilkinson, Jr

A contactless, three-dimensional fingerprint scanner apparatus, method, and system are described. The contactless fingerprint scanner can provide either, or both, topographical contrast of three-dimensional fingerprint features and optical contrast of a three-dimensional fingerprint surface. Data captured from scanning of a target with known geometric features mimicking fingerprint features can be examined as images or surface plots and analyzed for fidelity against the known target feature specifications to evaluate or validate device capture performance as well as interoperability. The target can be used by scanner vendors and designers to validate their devices, as well as to perform type certification.

Standard calibration target for contactless fingerprint scanners

The system of the present invention applies self-organizing and/or supervd learning network methods to the problem of segmentation. The segmenter receives a visual field, implemented as a sliding window and distinguishes occurrences of complete characters from occurrences of parts of neighboring characters. Images of isolated whole characters are true objects and the opposite of true objects are anti-objects, centered on the space between two characters. The window is moved across a line of text producing a sequence of images and the segmentation system distinguishes true objects from anti-objects. Frames classified as anti-objects demarcate character boundaries, and frames classified as true objects represent detected character images. The system of the present invention may be a feedforward adaption using a symmetric triggering network. Inputs to the network are applied directly to the separate associative memories of the network. The associative memories produce a best match pattern output for each part of the input data. The associative memories provide two or more subnetworks which define data subsets, such as objects or anti-objects, according to previously learned examples. Multi-layer perceptron architecture may also be used in the system of the present invention rather than the symmetrically triggered feedforward adaptation with tradeoffs in training time but advantages in speed.

Object/anti-object neural network segmentation

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Boyds, MD, United States of America

Michael D Garris