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A Block Processing Approach to Fingerprint Ridge-Orientation Estimation



Author(s)

Iwasokun Gabriel Babatunde, Akinyokun Oluwole Charles and Olabode Olatubosun

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DOI:10.17265/1934-7332/2012.06.001

Department of Computer Science, Federal University of Technology, Akure, Nigeria

Fingerprint is one of the most universally accepted biometrics used in different and relevant fields of man’s endeavours including business transactions and human security. They have been used for the implementation of series of Automatic Fingerprint Identification Systems (AFIS) that have proved very adequate and efficient. Building an AFIS requires the implementation of different algorithms. One of such algorithms is the one concerned with fingerprint image enhancement which involves segmentation, normalization, ridge orientation estimation, ridge frequency estimation, filtering, binarization and thinning. In this research, the implementation of a modified approach to an existing ridge orientation estimation algorithm is presented with a view to increase speed and accuracy. The implementation was carried out in an environment characterized by Window Vista Home Basic operating system as platform and Matrix Laboratory (MatLab) as frontend engine. Synthetic images as well as real fingerprints obtained from selected staff and students of The Federal University of Technology, Akure (FUTA), Nigeria and the standard FVC2000 fingerprint database DB2 were used to test the adequacy of the resulting algorithm. The results show that the modified algorithm estimated the orientation with significant improvement over the original version.

Fingerprint, AFIS (automatic fingerprint identification systems), ridge orientation, biometrics, singular point.