07-09-2014, 08:35 PM
In biometric identification, fingerprint recognition is most popular and widely used method fingerprints were used as a means of positively identifying a person and are used in law enforcement. Fingerprint recognition has a lot of advantages, a fingerprint is compact, unique for every person, and stable over the lifetime. This dissertation presents an investigation and comparative study to extract minutiae points in a particular fingerprint image. In most cases, fingerprint images available are not of good quality; they may be corrupted and degraded due to variation in skin and effective condition. Fingerprint matching is the process used to determine whether two sets of fingerprint ridge detail come from the same finger. There exist multiple algorithms that do fingerprint matching in many different ways. Some methods involve matching minutiae points between the two images, while others look for similarities in the bigger structure of the fingerprint. In this dissertation we propose a method for fingerprint matching based on minutiae matching. However, unlike conventional minutiae matching algorithms also takes into account region and line structures that exist between minutiae pairs. This allows for more structural information of the fingerprint to be accounted for thus resulting in stronger certainty of matching minutiae. Also, since most of the region analysis is preprocessed it does not make the algorithm slower.