Multiscale approach for thinning ridges of fingerprint

Abstract

This paper presents a robust multiscale method to create thinned ridge map of fingerprint for automatic recognition by employing an elaborately designed wavelet function. Properties of the new wavelet function are substantially investigated. Some desirable characteristics of the local minimum produced by wavelet transform show that they are suitable to describe skeleton of ribbon-shape objects. A multiscale thinning algorithm based on the modulus minima of wavelet transform is proposed. The proposed algorithm is able to improve the skeleton representation of the ridge of fingerprint without side-effects and limitations of previous methods. Thinned ridge map helps to facilitate minutiae extraction for matching. Experiments validated effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.