St Reading Determination of Minutiae Scores for Fingerprint Image Applications * 5 1st Reading

27 Many Automatic Fingerprint Identification Systems (AFIS) are based on minutiae matching. Minutiae are the terminations and bifurcations of the ridge lines in a fin-29 gerprint image. A gray-scale fingerprint image that has undergone binarization, followed by thinning, in order to extract the minutiae, may contain hundreds of minutiae, all of 31 which are not so vivid and obvious in the original image. Thus, the set of minutiae that are well-defined and more prominent than the rest should be given higher relevance and 33 importance in the process of minutiae matching. In this work, a gray-scale fingerprint image is first preprocessed to produce a thinned 35 binary image. Next, a method to assign a score value to each of the extracted minutiae is * This work is funded in part by a grant from Intel Corp., USA (PO #CAC042717000), US patent pending. 2 P. Bhowmick et al. proposed, based on certain topographical properties of a minutia. The score associated 1 to a minutia signifies its robustness and prominence. A minutia with a higher score value should be considered with higher priority in the matching scheme to yield better results. 3 Experimental results on several standard databases have been reported.