A fingerprint matching using minutia ridge shape for low cost match-on-card systems

In recent years, there is an increasing trend of using bio-metric identifiers for personal authentication. Encouraged by advances in smart card technologies, the fingerprint matching gets increasingly embedded into smart cards for an effective personal authentication method. However, current generation of low cost smart cards are usually equipped with limited hardware resources such as an 8-bit or 16-bit microcontroller. The fingerprint matching typically is a time consuming, computationally intensive and costly process. Therefore, it is still a challenge to integrate the fingerprint matching into a smart card. In this paper, we present a fast memory-efficient fingerprint matching using minutia ridge shape feature. This feature offers advantages of smaller template size, smaller memory requirement, faster matching time and robust matching against image distortion over conventional minutiae-based feature. The implementation result shows that the proposed method can be embedded in smart cards for a real-time Match-on-Card system.