Personal verification system with high tolerance of poor-quality fingerprints

A highly reliable personal verification system using fingerprint images has been developed. Various image enhancement techniques including a directional spatial filter and local thresholding for each point are applied to improve the quality of noisy and unstable images and to extract the feature data as accurately as possible. This process is performed by our special hardware for rapid image processing operations. In the matching process we propose a new algorithm combining the coarse matching of ridge direction data with the precise matching of minutia data to achieve registration efficiently. This system provides high reliability and a real-time response at reasonable cost.