Efficient fingerprint feature extraction: Algorithm and performance evaluation

This paper summarises a simple procedure for extracting fingerprint minutiae from a digital greyscale image. Many approaches were studied and the best selected and implemented. A sequential binarisation approach was chosen implementing Otsupsilas method for binarisation, a parallel thinning algorithm and then a crossing number approach for the minutiae extraction steps. The algorithm was implemented in a Matlab environment using images from the FVC2004 database. In order to show the performance of this algorithm results are presented and compared to another similar algorithm found in literature.