Design and implementation of a fingerprint-based biometric access control system

Abstract

Security systems are often penetrated by sophisticated criminals, thus there is always a need for new solutions to be devised to give sufficient security to houses and other locations. The goal of this project is to build and deploy a fingerprint-based biometric access control system. The fingerprint is a pattern of ridges and valleys on the surface of a fingertip. Among various biometrics, fingerprint recognition is the most extensively and internationally accepted biometric because of its uniqueness, accuracy, cost-effectiveness, non-transferability, and ease of use. Presented is the system architecture for the system development that demonstrates component augmentation, detail extraction, and matching methodologies. MATLAB and the programming language C were used to develop a software application that was used to build algorithms for improvement, minutiae extraction, and matching processing. The software works by extracting meaningful features known as minutiae points from the person’s fingerprint, then records and stores these minutiae points to verify the person’s identity in the future.  The resulting minutiae information is used to find matching fingerprints and to register these fingerprints in the system database. Finally, a verification system and identification system were realized. The proposed automatic door access control system was implemented using the Arduino Atmega 328p microcontroller. The proposed system was tried-out in real-time, and its performance was deemed adequate.