Fingerprint matching using minutiae and texture features

The advent of solid-state fingerprint sensors presents a fresh challenge to traditional fingerprint matching algorithms. These sensors provide a small contact area ( 0:6" 0:6") for the fingertip and, therefore, sense only a limited portion of the fingerprint. Thus multiple impressions of the same fingerprint may have only a small region of overlap. Minutiaebased matching algorithms, which consider ridge activity only in the vicinity of minutiae points, are not likely to perform well on these images due to the insufficient number of corresponding points in the input and template images. We present a hybrid matching algorithm that uses both minutiae (point) information and texture (region) information for matching the fingerprints. Results obtained on a database of 2; 560 images show that a combination of the texture-based and minutiae-based matching scores leads to a substantial improvement in the overall matching performance.