World Journal of Science and Technology 2012, 2(4):178-181

ISSN: 2231 2587

Available Online: www.worldjournalofscience.com

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Proceedings of "Conference on Advances in Communication and Computing (NCACC'12)
Held at R.C.Patel Institute of Technology, Shirpur, Dist. Dhule,Maharastra,India.
April 21, 2012

Fingerprint recognition using minutia matching

Smital D.Patil1 and Shailaja A.Patil2
Department of Electronics and Telecommunication, R.C.Patel Institute of Technology,Shirpur,Dist.Dhule.Maharashtra,India.
Abstract
In the modern computerized world, it has become more and more important to authenticate people in a secure way. Modern
applications like online banking or online shopping use techniques that depend on personal identification numbers, keys, or
passwords. Nevertheless, these technologies imply the risk of data being forgotten, lost, or even stolen. Therefore biometric
authentication methods promise a unique way to be able to authenticate people. A secure and confidential biometric
authentication method is the utilization of fingerprints. Usually a technique called minutiae matching is used to be able to
handle automatic fingerprint recognition with a computer system.
Keywords: Fingerprint,minutia,Euclidean Distance.
INTRODUCTION
The problem of resolving the identity of a person can be
categorized into two fundamentally distinct types of problems with
different inherent complexities (i) verification and (ii) recognition.
Verification (authentication) refers to the problem of confirming or
denying a persons claimed identity.Recognition refers to the problem
of establishing a subjects identity. A reliable personal identification is
critical in many daily transactions. For example, access control to
physical facilities and computer privileges are becoming increasingly
important to prevent their abuse. There is an increasing interest in
inexpensive and reliable personal identification in many emerging
civilian, commercial, and financial applications.
Fingerprint recognition or fingerprint authentication refers to
the automated method of verifying a match between two human
fingerprints. Fingerprints are one of many forms of biometrics used to
identify an individual and verify their identity. Because of their
uniqueness and consistency over time, fingerprints have been used
for over a century, more recently becoming automated(i.e.a
biometric) due to advancement in computing capabilities. Fingerprint
identification is popular because of the inherent ease in acquisition,
the numerous sources (ten fingers) available for collection, and their
established use and collections by law enforcement and immigration.

an impression of the friction ridges and furrows on all parts of a

finger. These ridges and furrows present good similarities in each
small local window, like parallelism and average width.
A fingerprint pattern is comprised of a sequence of ridges and
valleys. In a fingerprint image, the ridges appear as dark lines while
the valleys are the light areas between the ridges.

Fig 1. Fingerprint image from a sensor

A cut or burn to a finger does not affect the underlying ridge

structure, and the original pattern will be reproduced when new skin
grows. Ridges and valleys generally run parallel to each other, and
their patterns can be analyzed on a global and local level. The three
basic types of these singular regions are loop, delta, and whorl,
examples of which are shown in Figure 2.

What is a Fingerprint?
A fingerprint is the feature pattern of one finger (Figure 1). It is

*Corresponding Author
Smital D.Patil
Department of Electronics and Telecommunication, R.C.Patel Institute of
Technology,Shirpur,Dist.Dhule.Maharashtra,India.
Email: smital_patil@rediffmail.com

Fig 2. Singular regions and core points

However, shown by intensive research on fingerprint

recognition, fingerprints are not distinguished by their ridges and

World Journal of Science and Technology 2012, 2(4):178-181

furrows, but by features called Minutia, which are some abnormal

points on the ridges (Figure 3).Among the variety of minutia types
reported in literatures, two are mostly significant and in heavy usage:
Ridge ending - the abrupt end of a ridge
Ridge bifurcation - a single ridge that divides into two ridges

Fig 3.Basic types of minutiae

What is a Fingerprint recognition?

Fingerprint recognition (sometimes referred to as
dactyloscopy) is the process of comparing questioned and known
fingerprint against another fingerprint to determine if the impressions
are from the same finger or not. It includes two sub-domains: one is
fingerprint verification and the other is fingerprint identification
(Figure 4). In addition, different from the manual approach for
fingerprint recognition by experts, the fingerprint recognition here is
referred as AFRS (Automatic Fingerprint Recognition System),which
is program-based.

179

any other existing biometric technology.

LITERATURE OVERVIEW
Ashwini R.Patil,Mukesh A.Zaveri in,A Novel Approach for
Fingerprint Matching using Minutiae have proposed effective
fingerprint matching algorithm based on feature extraction. They
have also presented a novel fingerprint recognition technique for
minutia extraction and a minutia matching.For minutia marking they
considered one special false minutiae removal method.[1].Chandra
Bhan Pal, Amit Kumar Singh, Nitin, Amrit Kumar Agrawal in An
Efficient Multi Fingerprint Verification System Using Minutiae
Extraction Technique has combined many methods to build a
minutia extractor and a minutia matcher.[4].H B Kekre and V A
Bharadi in Fingerprint Core Point Detection Algorithm Using
Orientation Field Based Multiple Features have used Correlation
based Fingerprint Recognition rather than detecting minutiae.[9]Mary
Lourde R and Dushyant Khosla in Fingerprint Identification in
Biometric Security Systemsproposed the issue of selection of an
optimal algorithm for fingerprint matching in order to design a system
that matches required specifications in performance and
accuracy.[10]Chomtip Pornpanomchai Apiradee Phaisitkulwiwat
in,Fingerprint recognition by Euclidean Distanceproposed the
fingerprint recognition by euclidean distance method.[6]
SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE
The architecture of a fingerprint-based automatic
authentication system is shown in Figure 5. It consists of four
components:(i)user interface (ii)system database(iii)enrollment
module and (iv)authentication module.

Fig 4. Verification vs.Identification

However, in all fingerprint recognition problems,either

verification(one to one matching) or identification(one to many
matching), the underlining principlesof well defined representation of
a fingerprint and matching remains the same.

Fingerprint as a biometric:
A smoothly flowing pattern formed by alternating crests
(ridges) and troughs (valleys) on the palmar aspect of hand is called
a palmprint. Formation of a palmprint depends on the initial
conditions of the embryonic mesoderm from which they develop. The
pattern on pulp of each terminal phalanx is considered as an
individual pattern and is commonly referred to as a fingerprint. A
fingerprint is believed to be unique to each person.Fingerprints of
even identical twins are different.Fingerprints are one of the most
mature biometric technologies and are considered legitimate proofs
of evidence in courts of law all over the world. Fingerprints are,
therefore, used in forensic divisions worldwide for criminal
investigations. More recently, an increasing number of civilian and
commercial applications are either using or actively considering to
use fingerprintbased identification because of a better understanding
of fingerprints as well as demonstrated matching performance than

Fig 5. System Architecture

The user interface provides mechanisms for a user to

indicate his/her identity and input his/her fingerprints into the
system.The system database consists of a collection of records,
each of which corresponds to an authorized person that has access
to the system.The task of enrollment module is to enroll persons and
their fingerprints into the system database.A minutiae extraction
algorithm is first applied to the fingerprint images and the minutiae
patterns are extracted. The task of authentication module is to
authenticate the identity of the person who intends to access the
system. The person to be authenticated indicates his/her identity and
places his/her finger on the fingerprint scanner; a digital image of
his/her fingerprint is captured; minutiae pattern is extracted from the
captured fingerprint image and fed to a matching algorithm which
matches it against the persons minutiae templates stored in the
system database to establish the identity.
A.Techniques for fingerprint recognition:

Patil and Patil

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Fingerprint Image Enhancement: Fingerprint image

enhancement is to make the image clearer for easy further
operations. Since the fingerprint images acquired from sensors or
other media are not assured with perfect quality, enhancement
methods, for increasing the contrast between ridges and furrows and
for connecting the false broken points of ridges due to insufficient
amount of ink are very useful to keep a higher accuracy to fingerprint
recognition.

Minutia Marking: After the fingerprint ridge thinning, marking

minutia points is relatively easy. We only need that how can we
found out the bifurcation and termination in thinned image. In general,
for each 3x3 window, if the central pixel is 1 and has exactly 3 onevalue neighbors, then the central pixel is a ridge branch (Fig 6). If the
central pixel is 1 and has only 1 one-value neighbor, then the central
pixel is a ridge ending (Fig 7).

Fingerprint Image Binarization: A locally adaptive

binarization method is performed to binarize the fingerprint image.
Such a named method comes from the mechanism of transforming a
pixel value to 1 if the value is larger than the mean intensity value of
the current block (16x16) to which the pixel belongs.

C. Fingerprint Post-processing

Fingerprint Image Segmentation: In general, only a

Region of Interest (ROI) is useful to be recognized for each
fingerprint image. The image area without effective ridges and
furrows is first discarded since it only holds background information.
Then the bound of the remaining effective area is sketched out since
the minutia in the bounded region is confusing with those spurious
minutiae that are generated when the ridges are out of the sensor.

The preprocessing stage does not totally heal the fingerprint

image. For example, false ridge breaks due to insufficient amount
of ink and ridge cross-connections due to over inking are not totally
eliminated. Actually all the earlier stages themselves occasionally
introduce some artifacts which later lead to spurious minutia.
Twelve types of false minutia are specified in Fig.8.

Fig 8. False minutia

Procedures to remove false minutia are:

Figure 6. Minutia Extarction

1. If the distance between one bifurcation and one termination is

less than D and the two minutias are in the same ridge (m1
case). Remove both of them. D is the average interridge width
representing the average distance between two parallel
neighboring ridges.
2. If the distance between two bifurcations is less than D and they
are in the same ridge, remove the two bifurcations (m2, m3,
m8, m10, m11 cases).

Figure 7. Bifurcation and Termination

To extract the ROI, a two-step method is used. The first step

is block direction estimation and direction variety check, while the
second is intrigued from some Morphological methods. Two
Morphological operations called OPEN and CLOSE are adopted.
The OPEN operation can expand images and remove peaks
introduced by background noise. The CLOSE operation can shrink
images and eliminate small cavities.
B. Minutia Extraction

Fingerprint Ridge Thinning: Thinning is the process of
reducing the thickness of each line of patterns to just a single pixel
width. The requirements of a good thinning algorithm with respect to
a fingerprint are a) The thinned fingerprint image obtained should be
of single pixel width with no discontinuities. b) Each ridge should be
thinned to its centre pixel. c) Noise and singular pixels should be
eliminated. d) No further removal of pixels should be possible after
completion of thinning process. The built-in Morphological thinning
function in MATLAB to do the thinning and after that an enhanced
thinning algorithm is applied to obtain an accurately thinned image.

3. If two terminations are within a distance D and their directions

are coincident with a small angle variation. And they suffice the
condition that no any other termination is located between the
two terminations. Then the two terminations are regarded as
false minutia derived from a broken ridge and are removed
(case m4, m5, m6).
4. If two terminations are located in a short ridge with length less
than D, remove the two terminations (m7).
5. If a branch point has at least two neighboring branch points,
which are each no further away than maximum distance
threshold value and these branch points are closely connected
on common line segment than remove the branch points (m12).
Each minutia is completely characterized by the following
parameters: 1) x-coordinate, 2) y-coordinate,and 3)orientation.
RESULTS AND ANALYSIS
After applying this algorithm on each fingerprint, we got the
bifurcation and terminations as features. For matching we consider
two fingerprint images. One is input image and other is query image.
For matching purpose we have considered five persons with
two fingerprints of each person.Fingerprint database has been taken

World Journal of Science and Technology 2012, 2(4):178-181

from FVC2000. We have to see that by considering these features

whether query image matches with the images in the databases or
not. Two indexes are well accepted to determine the performance of
a fingerprint recognition system:

FAR (False Acceptance Rate) - It measures the percent of

invalid inputs which are incorrectly accepted.

FRR (False Rejection Rate) - It measures the percent of valid

inputs which are incorrectly rejected.
Database
10 fingerprints

Result
FAR=40%

CONCLUSION
Improved thinning in the present work contributes to: a) The
image becomes perfectly thinned to single pixel width. b) More
number of bifurcations can be detected, which were missed earlier
due to the presence of erroneous pixels in the thinned image.
The reliability of any fingerprint matching system strongly
relies on the precision obtained in the minutia extraction process. A
number of factors are deleterious to the correct location of minutia.
Among them, the main factor is poor image quality. In this phase, a
minutia extractor and a minutia matcher are using following
concepts- segmentation using morphological operations,minutia
marking by specially considering the average inter-ridge width,
minutia unification by decomposing a branch into three terminations
and matching in the unified x-y coordinate system after a 2-step
transformation in order to increase the precision of the minutia
localization process and elimination of spurious minutia with higher
accuracy.
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181

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