A novel method for touch-less finger print authentication

We propose a `Touch-less finger print system´, the hardware of which is limited to just a webcam and a processor. The present biometric systems are either costly or unhygienic, as a person who is perfectly healthy may acquire a disease from the system which was already used by a diseased person. For various reasons, users are concerned about touching the biometric scanners. Even then fingerprint remains to be the most unique feature of any person. Webcams are concomitant with today´s PCs and laptops making it easier to implement our system. Our proposal is basically a software that can be implemented anywhere with access to a PC and a webcam. We use a web camera to capture the user´s finger at a distance for recognition. The finger image so obtained is isolated from the background and ridges are extracted. The finger print is then processed in Euclidean space to obtain the minutiae points. Spurious minutiae are removed and the orientations and Euclidean distances of the minutiae points are saved for future matching. The main applications of this system widens to almost all fields especially Personal security (PC, Laptops and Mobile Phones), Defense, Attendance, ATM etc.