Image enhancement and minutiae matching in fingerprint verification

Fingerprint image enhancement and minutiae matching are two key steps in an automatic fingerprint identification system. In this paper, we develop a fingerprint image enhancement algorithm based on orientation fields; According to the principles of Jain et al.'s matching algorithm, we also introduce ideas along the following three aspects: introduction of ridge information into the minutiae matching process in a simple but effective way, which solves the problem of reference point pair selection with low computational cost; use of a variable sized bounding box to make our algorithm more robust to non-linear deformation between fingerprint images; use of a simpler alignment method in our algorithm. Experiments using the Fingerprint Verification Competition 2000 (FVC2000) databases with the FVC2000 performance evaluation show that these ideas are effective. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.