Fingerprint indexing based on singular point correlation

Fingerprint indexing is an efficient technique that greatly improves the performance of automated fingerprint identification systems. We propose a continuous fingerprint indexing method based on location, direction estimation and correlation of fingerprint singular points. Location and direction estimation are achieved simultaneously by applying a T-shape model to directional field of fingerprint images. The T-shape model analyzes homocentric sectors around the candidate singular points to find lateral-axes and further main-axes. Then a distortion-tolerant filter of minimum average correlation energy is utilized to obtain a correlation-based similarity measure which gives the evidence of searching priority. The experiment is performed by 400-fingerprint retrieval from 10,000 templates and the mean search space is only 3.46% of the whole dataset.