An Efficient Fingerprint Matching by Multiple Reference Points

This paper introduces an efficient fingerprint matching method based on multiple reference minutiae points. First, we attempt to effectively align two fingerprints by employing multiple reference minutiae points. However, the corresponding minutiae points between two fingerprints are ambiguous since a minutia of one fingerprint can be a match to any minutia of the other fingerprint. Therefore, we introduce a novel method based on linear classification concept to establish minutiae correspondences between two fingerprints. Each minutiae correspondence represents a possible alignment. For each possible alignment, a matching score is computed using minutiae and ridge orientation features and the maximum score is then selected to represent the similarity of the two fingerprints. The proposed method is evaluated using fingerprint databases, FVC2002 and FVC2004. In addition, we compare our approach with two existing methods and find that our approach outperforms them in term of matching accuracy, especially in the case of non-linear distorted fingerprints. Furthermore, the experiments show that our method provides additional advantages in low quality fingerprint images such as inaccurate position, missing minutiae, and spurious extracted minutiae.