Fingerprint minutiae extraction based on principal curves

It is important to extract minutiae of a fingerprint for the implementation of an auto fingerprint identification system. In this paper, the principal graph algorithm proposed by Kegl is used to obtain principal curves, which can be served as the skeletons of a fingerprint. Based on the obtained principal curves, a minutiae extraction algorithm is proposed to extract minutiae of the fingerprint. The experimental results indicate that principal curves obtained from the principal graph algorithm are smoother than the ones obtained from thinning algorithm, and the minutiae extracted by the proposed algorithm are more efficient.