A Novel Approach For Fingerprint Verification Using Scale Invariant Key Points

Fingerprint based verification systems have gained immense popularity due to the high level of uniqueness attributed to fingerprints and the availability of compact fingerprint sensors that can be easily embedded into a wide variety of devices requiring user authentication. Fingerprints are being extensively used for person identification in a number of commercial, civil, and forensic applications. Most of the current fingerprint verification systems utilize features that are based on minutiae points and ridge patterns. While minutiae based fingerprint verification systems have shown fairly high accuracies, further improvements in their performance are needed for acceptable performance, especially in applications involving very large scale databases. In an effort to extend the existing technology for fingerprint verification, we propose a new representation and matching scheme for fingerprint using Scale invariant key points. We extract characteristic of Scale invariant key points in scale space and perform matching based on the texture information around the feature points using the Scale invariant key points operator. A systematic strategy of applying Scale invariant key points to fingerprint images is proposed. We have used a public domain fingerprint database (FVC 2002).