An Efficient Fingerprint Matching System for Low Quality Images

Fingerprint-based identification is one of the most well-known and publicized biometrics for personal identification. It remains a reliable, efficient and commonly accepted biometric. In this paper, a fingerprint recognition system for identifying the low quality fingerprint images on Myanmar National Registration Cards (NRCs) is developed. Traditional minutia based approach is not robust to poor quality fingerprint images. In proposed system, ridge feature-based approach for fingerprint recognition using contextual filter and single pass thinning algorithm is developed. The input image is preprocessed and gabor filtering is applied for ridge line enhancement. The system extracts the ridge line features from the skeleton image derived from single pass thinning algorithm and it is compared to the database using Euclidean distance metric. The effectiveness of the proposed system can be confirmed through the experimental results. General Terms Pattern Recognition, Image Processing, Biometric