Automatic Detection of Secondary Creases in Fingerprints

Human ngerprints comprise a series of whorls or ridges In some special cases these whorls are broken by so called secondary creases co linear breaks across a sequence of adjacent ridges A technique to au tomatically detect such creases in ngerprints is described This technique utilizes a combination of spatial ltering and region growing to identify the morphology of the locally fragmented ngerprint image Regions are then thinned to form a skeletal model of the ridge structure Creases are characterised by co linear terminations on ridges and are isolated by analysing the Hough transform space derived from the ridge end points Empirical results using both synthetic and real data are presented and