Advances in fingerprint recognition algorithms with application

Great improvement has been achieved in the on-line fingerprint sensing technology, automatic fingerprint recognition algorithms and fingerprint applications. Various fingerprint recognition techniques, including fingerprint acquisition, classification, enhancement and matching, have been developed. This chapter overviews recent advances in fingerprint recognition techniques and summarizes algorithms proposed for every step with special focuses on the enhancement of low-quality fingerprints and the matching of distorted fingerprint images. Both issues are believed to be significant and challenging tasks. We also discuss the common evaluation for fingerprint recognition algorithms: Fingerprint Verification Competition 2004 (FVC2004) and Fingerprint Vendor Technology Evaluation 2003 (FpVTE2003), based on which we can measure the performance of recognition algorithms objectively and uniformly. In addition, fingerprint recognition has been increasingly used to realize personal identification in civilian’s daily life, such as fingerprint mobile phones, ID cards, fingerprint hard disks and so on. In this chapter, we introduce an application case: the fingerprint mobile phone which utilizes fingerprint recognition to ensure information security. It is composed of two parts: one is a front-end fingerprint capture subsystem, and the other is a back-end fingerprint recognition system based on smart phones.