Direct minutiae extraction from gray-level fingerprint image by relationship examination

A new method to extract the minutiae from the gray-level fingerprint image is presented in this paper. The proposed method determines the minutiae by examining the relationship of the ridges and furrows. The minutiae change the relationship between the ridges and furrows, so the minutiae can be detected by finding relationship change. By following the ridges and furrows along the local direction, the relationship change can be extracted. Experimental results demonstrate that the method developed based on the new approach is insensitive to noise and hence extract minutiae better.