The fingerprint classification is an important and effective method to quicken the process and improve the accuracy in the fingerprint matching process. Conventional supervised methods need a large amount of pre-labeled data and thus consume immense
human resources. In this paper, we propose a new and efficient unsupervised deep learning method that can extract fingerprint features and classify fingerprint patterns automatically. In this approach, a new model named constraint convolutional auto-encoder (CCAE) is used to extract fingerprint features and a hybrid clustering strategy is applied to obtain the final clusters. A set of experiments in the NIST-DB4 dataset shows that the proposed unsupervised method exhibits the efficient performance on fingerprint classification. For example, the CCAE achieves an accuracy of 97.3% on only 1000 unlabeled fingerprints in the NIST-DB4.
