Chapter 23 - Fingerprint Recognition

Abstract

Fingerprints are one of the most mature biometric technologies and are considered legitimate evidence in courts of law all over the world. Fingerprints are, therefore, routinely used in forensic divisions worldwide for criminal investigations. This chapter provides an overview of fingerprint-based identification and summarizes algorithms for fingerprint feature extraction, enhancement, matching, and classification. It also presents a performance evaluation of these algorithms. The architecture of a fingerprint-based automatic identity authentication system consists of four components: user interface, system database, enrollment module, and authentication module. The user interface provides mechanisms for a user to indicate his identity and input his fingerprints into the system. The system database consists of a collection of records, each of which corresponds to an authorized person that has access to the system. The task of the enrollment module is to enroll persons and their fingerprints into the system database. The task of the authentication module is to authenticate the identity of the person who intends to access the system.