A new scheme for touchless fingerprint recognition system

Fingerprint-based recognition systems are widely used in the field of biometrics. Most of the fingerprint sensors developed so far acquire fingerprint images through the surface of a solid plate, which degrades the recognition performance due to deformations. These deformations are caused by the pressure of the physical contact that is costly and hard to estimate. A touchless fingerprint recognition system is devised using a camera sensor to resolve this problem. However, this system raises some new problems, such as defocusing, low ridge-valley contrast, 3D-to-2D mapping, and so forth. Adequate solutions are discussed by introducing modified steps to the algorithm. Our proposed system is compared with a primitive touchless sensor with no manipulation and the algorithm of the preceding touch-based system. Future work is suggested.