Determination of minutiae scores for fingerprint image applications

Abstract

Many Automatic Fingerprint Identification Systems (AFIS) are based on minutiae matching. Minutiae are the terminations and bifurcations of the ridge lines in a fingerprint image. A gray-scale fingerprint image that has undergone binarization, followed by thinning, in order to extract the minutiae, may contain hundreds of minutiae, all of which are not so vivid and obvious in the original image. Thus, the set of minutiae that are well-defined and more prominent than the rest should be given higher relevance and importance in the process of minutiae matching. In this work, a gray-scale fingerprint image is first preprocessed to produce a thinned binary image. Next, a method to assign a score value to each of the extracted minutiae i