Fingerprint identification using local Gabor filters

Conventional Gabor filter-based approaches are global considerations for the selections of Gabor filters. Owing to fingerprint patterns are full of ridges and valleys; the whole fingerprint can be viewed as the composition of many various local ridge-valley structures. Based on the various local ridge orientations and frequencies, the whole fingerprint is represented by a template of local Gabor filters. Therefore, the core point detection and fingerprint matching are directly performed from gray-scale images without preprocessing. As compared with the global Gabor filter-based approach, the proposed method not only saves memory space, but also speeds up the whole procedure. Testing with the same database, higher recognition rates are also achieved for the local approach.