Fingerprint matching by thin-plate spline modelling of elastic deformations

✍ Scribed by Asker M. Bazen; Sabih H. Gerez

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 2003
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 427 KB
• Volume: 36
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0031-3203
• DOI: 10.1016/s0031-3203(03)00036-0

✦ Synopsis

This paper presents a novel minutiae matching method that describes elastic distortions in ÿngerprints by means of a thin-plate spline model, which is estimated using a local and a global matching stage. After registration of the ÿngerprints according to the estimated model, the number of matching minutiae can be counted using very tight matching thresholds. For deformed ÿngerprints, the algorithm gives considerably higher matching scores compared to rigid matching algorithms, while only taking 100 ms on a 1 GHz P-III machine. Furthermore, it is shown that the observed deformations are di erent from those described by theoretical models proposed in the literature.