Combining exclusive and continuous fingerprint classification

For efficient fingerprint matching, we propose to combine the advantage of exclusive and continuous fingerprint classification. We develop two combined fingerprint classification methods. The first method classifies a fingerprint into arch, left loop, right loop, tented arch and whorl, then performs a continuous fingerprint classification in each class using the global rotation of the ridge flows or the distances between core points and delta points. The second method first classifies a fingerprint into arch, left loop, right loop and whorl using the direction image around the reference point and then performs a continuous fingerprint classification in each class using the FingerCode. Both methods can reduce fingerprint search time by nearly 95%.