Fingerprint Matching using Gabor Filters

We present a fingerprint matching scheme that utilizes a ridge feature map to match fingerprint images. The technique described here obviates the need for extracting minutiae points to match fingerprint images. The proposed scheme uses a set of 16 Gabor filters, whose spatial frequencies correspond to the average inter-ridge spacing in fingerprints, is used to capture the ridge strength at equally spaced orientations. A circular tessellation of filtered image is then used to construct the ridge feature map. This ridge feature map contains both global and local details in a fingerprint as a compact fixed length feature vector. The fingerprint matching is based on the Euclidean distance between two corresponding feature vectors. The genuine accept rate of the Gabor filter based matcher is observed to be ~ 10% to 15% higher than that of minutiae-based matcher at low false accept rates. Fingerprint feature extraction and matching takes ~ 7.1 seconds on a Pentium IV, 2.4 GHz processor.