A Review on Classification of Fingerprint Images

Abstract

Fingerprint is most widely used in individual identification especially in civilian applications, forensic laboratories etc. due to large bio-invariant characteristics of human fingerprints. A search over all the records in a data base takes a very long time and deteriorates accuracy as database is very large. To avoid this inconvenience, automatic fingerprint classification method is employed that does not require any user's interaction, reduce the search space and time and also increases accuracy of identifications. Classifying fingerprint images is a very difficult pattern recognition problem, due to the small interclass variability, the large intraclass variability, and the presence of noise and the ambiguous properties of fingerprints. In this paper we discuss about fingerprint classification and also review existing methods that have been applied for the classification problem.