Ridge directional singular points for fingerprint recognition and matching

In this paper, a new approach to extract singular points in a fingerprint image is presented. It is usually difficult to locate the exact position of a core or a delta due to the noisy nature of fingerprint images. These points are the most widely used for fingerprint classification and matching. Image enhancement, thinning, cropping, and alignment are used for minutiae extraction. Based on the Poincare curve obtained from the directional image, our algorithm extracts the Singular points in a fingerprint with high accuracy. It examines ridge directions when singular points are missing. The algorithm has been tested for classification performance on the NIST-4 fingerprint database and found to give better results than the neural networks algorithm. Copyright (C) 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.