Extraction of Singular Points from Directional Fields of Fingerprints

Biometric identification is an emerging subject in applications like high-security wireless access and secure transactions across computer networks. Fingerprints are easy to use and provide relatively good performance. Furthermore, fingerprint sensors are cheap and can be integrated easily in wireless hardware. In this paper, methods are presented for the estimation of a high resolution directional field from fingerprints. It is shown how, from the directional field, very accurate detection of the singular points and the orientations of those points can be obtained. These estimates can for instance be used for accurate registration (alignment) of two fingerprints in a fingerprint verification system.