Reliable and fast fingerprint identification for security applications

Fingerprint identification is one of the most popular and reliable personal biometric identification methods. This paper describes an on-line fingerprint identification system consisting of fingerprint image preprocessing, feature extraction and matching. The preprocessing part includes image enhancing steps to acquire binarized and skeletonized ridges, which are needed for feature points extraction. Feature points (minutiae) such as endpoints, bifurcations, and core point are then extracted, followed by false minutiae elimination. The fast and robust matching algorithm is proposed, which is a correlation-based method that runs over the 1/8 sized feature points maps.