Recent progress in fingerprint recognition

Fingerprint recognition has been increasingly used to realize personal identification in civilian's daily life, such as ID card, fingerprints hard disk and so on. Great improvement has been achieved in the on-line fingerprint sensing technology and automatic fingerprint recognition algorithms. Various fingerprint recognition techniques, including fingerprint acquisition, classification, enhancement and matching, are highly improved. This paper overviews recent advances in fingerprint recognition and summarizes the algorithm proposed for every step with special focuses on the enhancement of low-quality fingerprints and the matching of the distorted fingerprint images. Both issues are believed to be significant and challenging tasks. In addition, we also discuss the common evaluation for the fingerprint recognition algorithm of the Fingerprint Verification Competition 2004 (FVC2004) and the Fingerprint Vendor Technology Evaluation 2003 (FpVTE2003), based on which we could measure the performance of the recognition algorithm objectively and uniformly.