An effective method to extract fingerprint singular point

In a fingerprint recognition system, preprocessing is difficult and wasted time. We propose a method to build a direction matrix which can describe the fingerprint texture to improve the problems of obscure and broken images. Then, utilizing the direction matrix, we propose a feature extraction method to find out counts and locations from the fingerprint singular points, such as core point and delta point. We use NIST(4) as a fingerprint database and the results seem encouraging.