A novel fingerprint matching method based on the Hough transform without quantization of the Hough space

In contrast to the conventional usage of the Hough transform for fingerprint alignment, our novel Hough transform-based fingerprint registration algorithm proposed in this paper doesn´t need to discretize the Hough space when estimating the parameters of the rigid transformation between two fingerprint impressions. In our algorithm, the parameters (rotation, x translation and y translation) of the transform (rigid transform considered) can be estimated separately. In addition, the orientation fields from the fingerprints, instead of the minutiae, are used to estimate the most optimal rotation parameter. The experimental results obtained on the public domain collections of fingerprint images, FVC2002 db2 set A (800 fingerprints) and db3 set A (800 fingerprints), show that the new fingerprint registration algorithm presented in this paper is faster and more effective as compared to the conventional generalized Hough transform-based fingerprint alignment method.