# AFR-Net: Attention-Driven Fingerprint Recognition Network

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.13897 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.13897/

## Key facts

- Cited by 23 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 26 of its 73 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Nov 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0473/) (2014)
- [Spatial Transformer Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02025/) (2015)
- [Transformers in Vision: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.01169/) (2021)
- [Transformer in Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00112/) (2021)
- [Learning a Fixed-Length Fingerprint Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.09901/) (2019)
- [Face Transformer for Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14803/) (2021)
- [FingerNet: An Unified Deep Network for Fingerprint Minutiae Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.02228/) (2017)
- [PrintsGAN: Synthetic Fingerprint Generator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03674/) (2022)
- [C2CL: Contact to Contactless Fingerprint Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02811/) (2021)
- [Fingerprint Spoof Buster](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.04489/) (2017)
- [Automated Latent Fingerprint Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.01925/) (2017)
- [SpoofGAN: Synthetic Fingerprint Spoof Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06498/) (2022)
- [Generalizing Fingerprint Spoof Detector: Learning a One-Class Classifier](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.03918/) (2019)
- [Exploring Transformers for Behavioural Biometrics: A Case Study in Gait Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.01441/) (2022)
- [Synthetic Latent Fingerprint Generator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.13811/) (2022)
- [Minutiae-Guided Fingerprint Embeddings via Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.13994/) (2022)
- [Matching Fingerphotos to Slap Fingerprint Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.08122/) (2018)
- [Fingerprint Presentation Attack Detection: A Sensor and Material Agnostic Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.02941/) (2020)
- [Transformer based Fingerprint Feature Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03846/) (2022)
- [Mobile Keystroke Biometrics Using Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.07596/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [IFViT: Interpretable Fixed-Length Representation for Fingerprint Matching via Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.08237/) (2024)
- [Latent Fingerprint Recognition: Fusion of Local and Global Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.13800/) (2023)
- [Universal Fingerprint Generation: Controllable Diffusion Model with Multimodal Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.13791/) (2024)
- [Benchmarking fixed-length Fingerprint Representations across different Embedding Sizes and Sensor Types](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.08615/) (2023)
- [Fixed-length Dense Descriptor for Efficient Fingerprint Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18576/) (2023)
- [Phase-aggregated Dual-branch Network for Efficient Fingerprint Dense Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.17159/) (2024)
- [Joint Identity Verification and Pose Alignment for Partial Fingerprints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.03959/) (2024)
- [Mobile Contactless Palmprint Recognition: Use of Multiscale, Multimodel Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.08111/) (2024)
- [Latent Fingerprint Matching via Dense Minutia Descriptor](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.01199/) (2024)
- [Finger Pose Estimation for Under-screen Fingerprint Sensor](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.02481/) (2025)
- [Fixed-Length Dense Fingerprint Representation with Alignment and Robust Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.03597/) (2025)
- [Child Palm-ID: Contactless Palmprint Recognition for Children](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05161/) (2023)
- [ViT Unified: Joint Fingerprint Recognition and Presentation Attack Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.07602/) (2023)
- [Deep Learning-Based Approaches for Contactless Fingerprints Segmentation and Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15163/) (2023)
- [Arabic Handwritten Text for Person Biometric Identification: A Deep Learning Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.00409/) (2024)
- [Cueless EEG imagined speech for subject identification: dataset and benchmarks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.09700/) (2025)
- [Exploring Kolmogorov-Arnold Network Expansions in Vision Transformers for Mitigating Catastrophic Forgetting in Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.04020/) (2025)
- [A Universal Latent Fingerprint Enhancer Using Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00231/) (2023)
- [Minutiae-Anchored Local Dense Representation for Fingerprint Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.15297/) (2025)
- [LatentPrintFormer: A Hybrid CNN-Transformer with Spatial Attention for Latent Fingerprint identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.08119/) (2025)
- [Identity-Consistent Multi-Pose Generation of Contactless Fingerprints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.03830/) (2026)
- [Progressive Learning of a Diffusion-based Inpainting Model for Separating Overlapped Fingerprints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.03937/) (2026)
- [AFID: A Unified Open Framework for Automated Fingermark Identification, Quality Assessment and Feature Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.07439/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The use of vision transformers (ViT) in computer vision is increasing due to limited inductive biases (e.g., locality, weight sharing, etc.) and increased scalability compared to other deep learning methods. This has led to some initial studies on the use of ViT for biometric recognition, including fingerprint recognition. In this work, we improve on these initial studies for transformers in fingerprint recognition by i.) evaluating additional attention-based architectures, ii.) scaling to larger and more diverse training and evaluation datasets, and iii.) combining the complimentary representations of attention-based and CNN-based embeddings for improved state-of-the-art (SOTA) fingerprint recognition (both authentication and identification). Our combined architecture, AFR-Net (Attention-Driven Fingerprint Recognition Network), outperforms several baseline transformer and CNN-based models, including a SOTA commercial fingerprint system, Verifinger v12.3, across intra-sensor, cross-sensor, and latent to rolled fingerprint matching datasets. Additionally, we propose a realignment strategy using local embeddings extracted from intermediate feature maps within the networks to refine the global embeddings in low certainty situations, which boosts the overall recognition accuracy significantly across each of the models. This realignment strategy requires no additional training and can be applied as a wrapper to any existing deep learning network (including attention-based, CNN-based, or both) to boost its performance.