Improving efficiency of fingerprint matching by minutiae indexing

This paper proposes a novel minutiae indexing method to speed up fingerprint matching, which narrows down the searching space of minutiae to reduce the expense of computation. An orderly sequence of features are extracted to describe each minutia and the indexing score is defined to select minutiae candidates from the query fingerprint for each minutia in the input fingerprint. The proposed method can be applied in both minutiae structure-based verification and fingerprint identification. Experiments are performed on a large-distorted fingerprint database (FVC2004 DB1) to approve the validity of the proposed method.