Minutiae Extraction from Fingerprint Images - a Review

TL;DR

This review paper discusses various techniques for extracting minutiae from fingerprint images, emphasizing the importance of accurate extraction amidst image degradation and the classification of methods based on image processing approaches.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of existing minutiae extraction techniques, categorizing them into binarized and grayscale image methods, aiding future research in fingerprint recognition.

Findings

Various minutiae extraction methods are classified and compared.

Image enhancement is crucial for accurate minutiae detection.

The review highlights challenges in processing degraded fingerprint images.

Abstract

Fingerprints are the oldest and most widely used form of biometric identification. Everyone is known to have unique, immutable fingerprints. As most Automatic Fingerprint Recognition Systems are based on local ridge features known as minutiae, marking minutiae accurately and rejecting false ones is very important. However, fingerprint images get degraded and corrupted due to variations in skin and impression conditions. Thus, image enhancement techniques are employed prior to minutiae extraction. A critical step in automatic fingerprint matching is to reliably extract minutiae from the input fingerprint images. This paper presents a review of a large number of techniques present in the literature for extracting fingerprint minutiae. The techniques are broadly classified as those working on binarized images and those that work on gray scale images directly.