A Review on Fingerprint Classification Techniques

Automatic fingerprint recognition has been widely applied as a personal identification tool and biometrics applications due to their reliability and uniqueness features. One of the important tasks for any large scale fingerprint recognition system is fingerprint classification. Classifying a fingerprint images is a very difficult pattern recognition problem, due to the small interclass variability, the large intraclass variability, the presence of noise and the ambiguous properties of fingerprints. An accurate classification algorithm can greatly reduce the number of comparisons during fingerprint retrieval and consequently speeded up the identification process. Over the past few decades, a significant amount of researches and techniques has been proposed for distinguishing fingerprint classes. In this paper, we review existing approaches that have been applied to the classification problems. The explanation and discussion in this paper will cover the issues, designs and performance of several techniques for fingerprint classification system.