Towards Fingerprint Mosaicking Artifact Detection: A Self-Supervised Deep Learning Approach

Fingerprint mosaicking—the process of combining multiple fingerprint impressions into a single master fingerprint—is an essential step in modern biometric systems, but it is prone to errors that can significantly degrade image quality. This paper proposes a deep learning-based approach to detect and score hard mosaicking artifacts in fingerprint images. Our method uses a self-supervised learning framework to train a segmentation model on large-scale unlabeled fingerprint data, eliminating the need for manual artifact annotation. The proposed model effectively identifies mosaicking errors, achieving high segmentation performance across multiple fingerprint modalities—contactless, rolled, and pressed—and proves robust to different data sources. We also introduce a mosaicking artifact score that quantifies the severity of detected errors and enables automated evaluation of fingerprint images at scale. Training and evaluation rely on synthetic artifacts, we therefore provide a qualitative comparison to real stitching failures and discuss the limits of this validation strategy in detail. By addressing the previously underexplored problem of reference-free hard-artifact detection in fingerprints, our work contributes to improving the accuracy and reliability of fingerprint-based biometric systems.