Defining a control experiment

In order to assess the performance of a fingerprint recognition system under maritime environment, we first need to examine its performance under normal (dry) condition. By evaluating the system under typical dry condition, we define a control experiment to which we can compare the effects of water aging to the system.

To proceed with the controlled experiment, we first register the fingerprint of each volunteer under normal conditions, to use as a template. Once we uniquely determined the template, we then collect more dry prints from each individual. Then, we plot the ROC curve of the normal vs. normal print to analyze the behavior of the fingerprint recognition system when the dataset consists of only dry fingerprint samples. The following is a pictorial representation of the data organization defined for the controlled experiment.

Once we understood the behavior of the system under normal conditions, then we can proceed with evaluating the system under maritime environment.