Distribution Of Minutiae Research Articles

Distribution of different minutiae in thumbprint and its application to determine sex distinctions

BackgroundThe present study is an attempt to explore the distribution of different minutiae in two topological areas of thumbprint and its application to determine sex distinctions.MethodsFor this purpose, a sample of 100 subjects (50 males and 50 females) ranging in age from 18 years to 25 years were taken from the Shimla (North India). A modified standardized method was adopted to count and classify 20 different types of minutiae.ResultsFindings of the study indicated that the frequency of thumbprint minutiae was higher among males than their female counterparts. Ridge endings were the most frequently occurring minutiae followed by bifurcation and convergence in both the sexes. No M-B was noticed among female participant, while negligible percentage (0.04%) of males exhibited M-B. The mean values of most of the minutiae were found to be higher in the outer circle than inner circle of the thumbprint in both the sexes. Lower frequency of ridge ending (< 20 for right hand and 31–40 for both right and left hand), convergence (< 10 for both right and left hand), and bifurcation (< 10 and 31–40 for right hand and < 20 for left hand) have higher probability of female origin. While higher frequency of ridge ending (> 60 for right hand and > 50 for left hand), convergence (> 20 for both right and left hand) and bifurcation (> 40 for right hand and > 30 for left hand) was more likely of male origin.ConclusionsFindings of present study identified sex distinction in the distribution of minutiae with respect to the topological areas on the thumbprint.

Determination of sex using variations in minutiae distribution in thumbprints

The present study is an attempt to explore the distribution of different minutiae in two topological areas of thumbprint and its application to determine sex distinctions. For this purpose, a sample of 100 subjects (50 males and 50 females) ranging in age from 18 years to 25 years was taken from Delhi region in north India. A modified standardized method was adopted to count and classify 20 different types of minutiae. Finding of the study indicates that males had a higher frequency of thumbprint minutiae than females. Ridge endings were the most common feature in both sexes, followed by bifurcation and convergence. In both sexes, the mean values of most minutiae were found to be higher in the outer circle than the inner circle of the thumbprint. A higher chance of female origin is associated with lower frequency of ridge ending (20 for right hand and 31–40 for both right and left hand), convergence (10) and bifurcation (10 and 31–40 for right hand and 20 for left hand). While a greater frequency of ridge ending (>60 for right hand and >50 for left hand), convergence (>20 for both right and left hand) and bifurcation (>40 for right hand and >30 for left hand) was more likely of male origin. Findings of present study identified sex distinction in the distribution of minutiae with respect to the topological areas on the thumbprint.

Distribution of the minutiae in palmprints: Topological and sexual variability.

Palmprints have been systematically less studied than fingerprints, despite being of great use in the identification process. In Spain, they were not included in Automated Fingerprint Identification Systems (AFIS) until 2009. Very few investigations performed within the field of palmprints have assessed the sexual and population variability of the number and distribution of minutiae on its surface, despite the fact that these particularities are the basis for personal identification in forensic science. That is why a study was conducted to assess total, bimanual, and sexual density per morphological regions (superior or distal, thenar, and hypothenar) and per counting areas of 1cm2 on 120 palmprints obtained from 30 male and 30 female individuals of Spanish nationality. Also, the frequency in the location of each type of delta or triradius (a, b, c, d, and t) per count area was calculated. Results have shown a topological variability in the distribution of the density of minutiae, which is similar between sexes and a specular effect between both hands. The most frequent locations of the deltas coincide with areas of high minutiae density. It has also been shown that there are sexual differences in the total number of minutiae, which cannot be due to sexual dimorphism in adult hand size, since minutiae are established at an early stage of fetal development and their number will not change during later postnatal growth. These differences can only be attributed to genetic factors related to sexual determination.

A Swipe-Type Fingerprint Sensor Using Fixed-Displacement Shuttering Scheme

Biometric sensors for wearable devices have a dilemma between the small physical size to fit within the small device and the large sensing area to obtain enough information for reliable recognition. A swipe-type fingerprint sensor is a good candidate that satisfies both of small size and large sensing area. This paper proposes a compact swipe-type fingerprint sensor using a fixed-displacement shuttering scheme to avoid the swiping-speed dependent image distortion. The shutter for a line image sensor is adaptively controlled by the displacement measure unit, which are consist of two lines of pixel array, Soft-XOR circuits and digital control circuits. The displacement of a finger is detected by calculating the pattern matching of two line images, which are separated for fixed distance. The proposed system utilizes optical pixels for high-speed image capturing. The prototype sensor chip was fabricated with $0.25~\mu \text{m}$ standard CMOS process. The sensor chip occupies only 4mm $\times 0.9$ mm and provides 625 dpi up to 25cm/s of swiping speed. Experimental results obtained from the sensor demonstrate that the proposed shuttering method reduced minutiae distribution by factor of 3 over the conventional fixed-time interval shuttering.

Robust Optical Fingerprint Sensor to the Moisture Fingerprint

Optical technology is the most common sensor technology currently used in fingerprint recognition. Because the optical type of sensor has excellent durability and stability, it is used for many people to authenticate. On the other hand, semiconductor-type sensors are suitable for personal authentication, such as smartphones. This study examined ways to improve the problem of optical sensors, i.e., the difficulty in extracting the fingerprint minutiae via binarization, and determine the difference between the ridge and valley of a fingerprint when there is a lot of water or sweat on the fingerprint surface. Therefore, the structure of the prism was designed to distinguish between sweat and water. SF4 material with a minor influence of the refractive index was applied. In addition, spherical lenses, G1 and G2, were designed and implemented to correct the trapezoidal distortion and reduce cost. To demonstrate the superiority of the study results, the image quality map of NIST and the minutiae distribution were compared using fingerprint recognition technology. The results showed that the proposed sensor has a high NFIQ quality score in all normal and moisture fingerprints.

Types and frequency of fingerprint minutiae in individuals of Igbo and Yoruba ethnic groups of Nigeria

The population distribution of fingerprint minutiae is necessary to improve efficiency of fingerprints in identifying individuals in a population-specific manner. The objective of the study was to determine the distribution of different types of minutiae fingerprint feature in two Nigerian ethnic populations. Fingerprints from forty-four (44) Igbo individuals and forty-four (44) Yoruba individuals, both of Nigeria were collected using a manual impression method that uses ink pad and paper. Of all the minutiae types considered, bifurcations and convergences accounted for 54.85% of the study’s total minutiae counts (TMC). This study shows that the Igbo ethnic group consistently have higher count of all minutiae types and higher total minutiae counts for both hands statistically significant at P<0.001. We found association between gender and minutiae distribution in some minutiae types including fragment/point or dot (FP), overlap (OL) and break (BR). This work revealed important variations among individuals from the two ethnic groups on the distribution and variability of minutiae in Nigeria populations. Keywords: Dermatoglyphics, fingerprints, forensic, Igbo, minutiae, Nigeria, Yoruba.

Study of fingerprints in Argentina population for application in personal identification

The fingerprints of the Buenos Aires and Chubut provinces in Argentina have been studied, with the aim of knowing and quantifying the variability of these features, which are used in the identification process. The data studied for this research was obtained from 330 individuals, of both sexes, from two Argentinian population samples (170 individuals from Buenos Aires and 160 from Chubut), which amounts to a total of 3300 fingerprints. The different types of minutiae were located, identified, and visually quantified in four areas on the fingerprint. Two perpendicular axes were drawn whose intersection was located in the center of fingerprint. In addition, a circle was defined on these quadrants whose radius cut fifteen ridges. This method divides the fingerprints into four quadrants with two sectors apiece. The results obtained for both populations were compared statistically with those published previously for an Argentinian population sample, which had been collected using the same methodology. Therefore, Argentina becomes the country with the most information in this matter.For both populations, the highest frequencies were of ridge endings, followed by bifurcations and convergences. In this study of minutiae, statistically significant differences were found between the area of the fingerprint (inside and outside the circle), males and females, and types of main pattern for both samples. However, although the results show common patterns in the distribution of minutiae, there are also significant differences between populations. This reveals a significant ancestral and frequency effect of the minutiae, which would indicate that the minutiae are more genetically dependent than has been suspected so far. Furthermore, the non-equiprobability found for the frequency of the types of minutiae indicates that the weight provided by these characteristics is not the same when applied in identification processes, whether used quantitatively (numerical standard) or qualitatively (holistic method).

Embedded Fingerprint Matching Mechanism in HIS for Health Care Service

As technologies develops, our needs can be increase and also it can be change.The invention of new medical equipment's in health care services can help both the patients and the doctors in several ways. In this paper an advanced ubiquitous echograph system is proposed, in such a way that, doctor can diagnoses the patient without seeing them face-to-face in hospital. Patient's having medical devices with advanced features (i.e., readings/outputs of device can be downloaded and transferred to pc) can send the test details to corresponding doctor of hospital, via wireless network. That is patient needs to consult the doctor, in hospital, only when an emergency situation arises. The recent technological innovations make this concept more realistic that is helpful in increasing the easiness of doctor's consulting duties and also decreases the maintenance cost of hospital. Some devices like AccuChek and glucose level checking device are used here to demonstrate my work, since almost all the echograph devices are expensive. A new prototype is embedded into HIS: a Fingerprint Matching System. By using this system, doctor's identification can be done easily, even if their fingers are altered. Since doctors can diagnose patients, even if they are not available in hospital, a valuable recognition system is needed to make ensure that doctor is authentic or not. So the fingerprint matcher is developed in such a way that it can detect any type of altered fingerprint and can matches altered ones to their respective unaltered fingerprint. This proposed paper is even applicable for telemedicine. Index Terms:Fingerprints, obfuscation, alteration, ridge pattern, minutiae distribution,echograph, Hospital Information System (HIS), ubiquitous computing

Multi-line code: A low complexity revocable fingerprint template for cancelable biometrics

A low computational cost cancelable fingerprint template, namely the multi-line codes was proposed. The formulation of a single-line code involves the inspection of minutiae distribution along a straight line constructed based on the reference minutia. Multi-line code is introduced to elevate the performance by combining several single-line codes. Experiments were carried out on a few FVC databases. It has been proven that the proposed method yields relatively low computational complexity as compared to existing minutiae distribution-based methods, while preserving the performance. The equal error rate obtained for FVC2002 DB1 is 4.69% in stolen-key case, and the total arithmetic operations utilized are 14 520 additions and zero multiplication.

Altered Fingerprints: Analysis and Detection

The widespread deployment of Automated Fingerprint Identification Systems (AFIS) in law enforcement and border control applications has heightened the need for ensuring that these systems are not compromised. While several issues related to fingerprint system security have been investigated, including the use of fake fingerprints for masquerading identity, the problem of fingerprint alteration or obfuscation has received very little attention. Fingerprint obfuscation refers to the deliberate alteration of the fingerprint pattern by an individual for the purpose of masking his identity. Several cases of fingerprint obfuscation have been reported in the press. Fingerprint image quality assessment software (e.g., NFIQ) cannot always detect altered fingerprints since the implicit image quality due to alteration may not change significantly. The main contributions of this paper are: 1) compiling case studies of incidents where individuals were found to have altered their fingerprints for circumventing AFIS, 2) investigating the impact of fingerprint alteration on the accuracy of a commercial fingerprint matcher, 3) classifying the alterations into three major categories and suggesting possible countermeasures, 4) developing a technique to automatically detect altered fingerprints based on analyzing orientation field and minutiae distribution, and 5) evaluating the proposed technique and the NFIQ algorithm on a large database of altered fingerprints provided by a law enforcement agency. Experimental results show the feasibility of the proposed approach in detecting altered fingerprints and highlight the need to further pursue this problem.

A New Approach for Fingerprint Classification based on Minutiae Distribution

The paper describes a new approach for fingerprint classification, based on the distribution of local features (minute details or minutiae) of the fingerprints. The main advantage is that fingerprint classification provides an indexing scheme to facilitate efficient matching in a large fingerprint database. A set of rules based on heuristic approach has been proposed. The area around the core point is treated as the area of interest for extracting the minutiae features as there are substantial variations around the core point as compared to the areas away from the core point. The core point in a fingerprint has been located at a point where there is maximum curvature. The experimental results report an overall average accuracy of 86.57 % in fingerprint classification. verification / identification. In this paper a methodology for fingerprint classification based on minutiae distribution has been proposed. Certain rules based on the probability distribution on minutiae for different fingerprint types have been formed. The minutiae information extracted for verification has been used for the classification.

Statistical Models for Assessing the Individuality of Fingerprints

Following the Daubert ruling in 1993, forensic evidence based on fingerprints was first challenged in the 1999 case of the U.S. versus Byron C. Mitchell and, subsequently, in 20 other cases involving fingerprint evidence. The main concern with the admissibility of fingerprint evidence is the problem of individualization, namely, that the fundamental premise for asserting the uniqueness of fingerprints has not been objectively tested and matching error rates are unknown. In order to assess the error rates, we require quantifying the variability of fingerprint features, namely, minutiae in the target population. A family of finite mixture models has been developed in this paper to represent the distribution of minutiae in fingerprint images, including minutiae clustering tendencies and dependencies in different regions of the fingerprint image domain. A mathematical model that computes the probability of a random correspondence (PRC) is derived based on the mixture models. A PRC of 2.25 times10-6 corresponding to 12 minutiae matches was computed for the NIST4 Special Database, when the numbers of query and template minutiae both equal 46. This is also the estimate of the PRC for a target population with a similar composition as that of NIST4.

From Template to Image: Reconstructing Fingerprints from Minutiae Points

Most fingerprint-based biometric systems store the minutiae template of a user in the database. It has been traditionally assumed that the minutiae template of a user does not reveal any information about the original fingerprint. In this paper, we challenge this notion and show that three levels of information about the parent fingerprint can be elicited from the minutiae template alone, viz., 1) the orientation field information, 2) the class or type information, and 3) the friction ridge structure. The orientation estimation algorithm determines the direction of local ridges using the evidence of minutiae triplets. The estimated orientation field, along with the given minutiae distribution, is then used to predict the class of the fingerprint. Finally, the ridge structure of the parent fingerprint is generated using streamlines that are based on the estimated orientation field. Line Integral Convolution is used to impart texture to the ensuing ridges, resulting in a ridge map resembling the parent fingerprint. The salient feature of this noniterative method to generate ridges is its ability to preserve the minutiae at specified locations in the reconstructed ridge map. Experiments using a commercial fingerprint matcher suggest that the reconstructed ridge structure bears close resemblance to the parent fingerprint.

A hybrid fingerprint matcher

Most fingerprint matching systems rely on the distribution of minutiae on the fingertip to represent and match fingerprints. While the ridge flow pattern is generally used for classifying fingerprints, it is seldom used for matching. This paper describes a hybrid fingerprint matching scheme that uses both minutiae and ridge flow information to represent and match fingerprints. A set of 8 Gabor filters, whose spatial frequencies correspond to the average inter-ridge spacing in fingerprints, is used to capture the ridge strength at equally spaced orientations. A square tessellation of the filtered images is then used to construct an eight-dimensional feature map, called the ridge feature map. The ridge feature map along with the minutiae set of a fingerprint image is used for matching purposes. The proposed technique has the following features: (i) the entire image is taken into account while constructing the ridge feature map; (ii) minutiae matching is used to determine the translation and rotation parameters relating the query and the template images for ridge feature map extraction; (iii) filtering and ridge feature map extraction are implemented in the frequency domain thereby speeding up the matching process; (iv) filtered query images are catched to greatly increase the one-to-many matching speed. The hybrid matcher performs better than a minutiae-based fingerprint matching system. The genuine accept rate of the hybrid matcher is observed to be ∼10% higher than that of a minutiae-based system at low FAR values. Fingerprint verification (one-to-one matching) using the hybrid matcher on a Pentium III, 800 MHz system takes ∼1.4 s , while fingerprint identification (one-to-many matching) involving 1000 templates takes ∼0.2 s per match.