New approach for identifying hereditary relation using primary fingerprint patterns

In this work, an effort has been made to explore the existence of hereditary relations by analysing the central region of the fingerprints using global ridge patterns. So far, fingerprint identification systems have been developed for biometric applications and criminal investigations. The present work attempts to identify the hereditary relation among inter and intra class family members using fingerprints. Fingerprints are obtained from 324 subjects of 54 families comprising of a group of three generations. Ridge pattern types and ridge orientation map are estimated for the analysis. The results obtained show that 85.18% of intra class family members have similar ridge pattern. The study on ridge orientation map indicates that the angles of ridge orientation field vary in the same way for intra class family members. Furthermore, the specific range of angles of ridge orientation field occurs maximum number of times for intra class members and location of median value of repetitions of orientation angles are the same. Hence, it is evident that the intra class members have certain similarities in fingerprint which in turn replicate the presence of hereditary relation.