A New Algorithm for Locating and Extracting Minutiae from Fingerprint Images

Abstract

Fingerprints are considered as the oldest and most widely used in the world for biometric identification. Every person has unique and permanent fingerprints. Most automatic fingerprint recognition systems are based on features formed from lines known as minutiae. Building a database of unique minutiae is very important in the security systems because it concerns the identification of the person committing a crime through the latent left in the crime scene. This research presents a new algorithm to give a minutia a unique value leading to accelerating the search process for a person. The algorithm splits the fingerprint image into four sections, then calculates the values for each minutia in each section and stores it in a database that is designed for this purpose. This research provides a great opportunity and additional options to fingerprint experts in order to solve many cases that are still undiscovered while searching for the latent in the database of minutiae. The results of testing this algorithm were very successful, very encouraging and helpful to fingerprint experts in their work.