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.