Direct minutiae extraction from gray-level fingerprint image by relationship examination

A new method to extract the minutiae from a gray-level fingerprint image is presented in this paper. The proposed method determines the minutiae by examining the relationship between the ridges and furrows. The minutiae change the relationship between the ridges and furrows, so the minutiae can be detected by finding the relationship change. By following the ridges and furrows along the local direction, the relationship change can be extracted. Experimental results demonstrate that the method developed based on the new approach is insensitive to noise and hence extracts minutiae better.