Fingerprint

Location of Distinctive
Characteristics
There is a great deal of distinctive information on the
average fingerprintenough to enable large-scale
searches using only one or two fingerprints. This
information is fairly stable throughout ones life and differs
from fingerprint to fingerprint, even for identical twins.
The fingerprint comprises ridges and valleys that form
distinctive patterns,such as swirls, loops, and arches.
Most fingerprints also have a core, a central point around
which swirls, loops, or arches are curved.
Deltas are points, normally at the lower left or right
corner of the fingerprint, around which ridges are centered
in a triangular shape

 Fingerprint ridges and valleys are characterized by

discontinuities and irregularities known as minutiaethese are
the distinctive features on which most finger-scan
technologies are based.
There are many types of minutiae, the most common being
ridge endings (the point at which a ridge ends) and
bifurcations (the point at which one ridge divides into two).
Depending on the size of the platen and the quality of the
vendor algorithm, a typical finger-scan image may produce
between 15 and 50 minutiaelarger platens will acquire more
of the fingerprint image, meaning that a greater number of
minutiae can be
located.
Figure 4.5 Steps involved in image processing.

Raw image
ridge isolation
thinned ridges

 Finger scan enrollment prompts

Template Creation
Vendors utilize proprietary algorithms to map fingerprint minutiae.
Information used when mapping minutiae can include the location and angle of a
minutia point, the type and quality of minutiae, and the distance and position
of minutiae relative to the core.
A user normally must place his or her enrollment fingerprint more than once
during enrollment, so that the system can locate the most consistently
generated minutiae
Finger-scan images will normally have distortions and false minutiae that must
be filtered out before template creation.
For example, anomalies caused by scars, sweat, or dirt can appear as minutiae.
Vendor algorithms scan images and eliminate features that simply seem to be in
the wrong place, such as adjacent minutiae or a ridge crossing perpendicular to a
series of other ridges.
A large percentage of false minutiae are discarded in this process, ensuring that
the template generated for enrollment or verification is an accurate reflection
of the biometric data

Template Matching
Finger-scan templates can range in size from
approximately 200 bytes to over 1,000 bytesa
very small amount of data by any measure.
These templates cannot be manually read as
anything resembling a fingerprint, and simply
performing a bit-to-bit comparison of two fingerscan templates will not determine whether they
are from the same person.
Instead, vendor algorithms are required to
process templates and to determine the
correlation between the two.

 Comparing enrollment and verification templates

does not result in an exact match.
The position of a minutia point may change by a
few pixels, some minutiae will differ from the
enrollment template, and false minutiae may be
seen as real.
Also, the fingerprint will inevitably be placed at a
slightly different angle. However, matching
algorithms can account for these variations and
allow for effective comparison of templates in
which much of the underlying data may have
changed

 There is no minimum number of minutiae

necessary for two finger-scan templates to match.
In some cases, the system may need to locate
only a handful of minutiae in common to decide
that two templates are a match.
Higher system thresholds will require that a higher
percentage of the minutiae points match and can
require more careful placement during verification.
If a The most basic determinant of these
thresholds will be whether the system is
implemented for convenience or security.

Competing Finger-Scan
Technologies
There are a handful of approaches to
the problem of acquiring fingerprint
images of sufficient quality to create
finger-scan templates. Optical, silicon,
and ultrasound are the leading
methods in use in the finger-scan
industry.

Optical technology
Optical technology is the oldest and most widely used finger-scan technology.
The user places a finger on a coated platen, built of hard, coated plastic or
coated glass. In essence, a camera registers the image of the fingerprint against
a coated glass or plastic platen, upon which the digitized ridges and valleys
appear as black, gray, and white lines. The camera acquires a series of images,
allowing the underlying software to assess fingerprint quality and generate
templates for enrollment or verification.
Optical technology has several strengths: It has been proven reliable over time,
is resistant to electrostatic discharge, is fairly inexpensive, and can provide
resolutions
up to 500 DPI, the benchmark for high-quality fingerprint images.
Optical technologys weaknesses include size (the platen must be of sufficient
surface area and depth to capture quality images), a sporadic tendency to
show latent prints as actual fingerprints, and a susceptibility to fake fingers.
Optical devices are deployed in logical access and physical access systems.
Most live-scan solutions, devices designed to acquire images for AFIS systems,
are based on optical imaging.