Fingerprint image analysis for automatic identification

Most of the papers on fingerprints deal with classification of fingerprint images. Fingerprint databases being large (in the range of millions), the effort in matching of fingerprints within a class or when the class is unknown, is very significant. This requires fingerprint image analysis and extraction of the “minutiae” features, which are used for matching FPs. In this paper a scheme of preprocessing and feature extraction of fingerprint images for automatic identification is presented, which works even if the pattern class is unknown. The identification of fingerprints is based on matching the minutiae features of a given finger-print against those stored in the database. The core and delta information is used for classification and for registration while matching. These algorithms have been tested for more than 10,000 fingerprint images of different qualities. The results are manually verified and found to be very good for practical application. A few sample results are presented.