Fingerprint Classification by Ridgeline and Singular Point Analysis

Fingerprint classification is an important indexing method for any large scale fingerprint recognition system or database as a method for reducing the number of fingerprints that need to be searched. Fingerprints are generally classified into broad categories based on global features. This paper describes a new fingerprint classification algorithm that uses some curve features of ridgelines. The algorithm mainly uses the total direction change of the ridgelines to classify the ridgelines. Using these information, classification is performed. The algorithm was tested on NIST-4 database and got a good accuracy for the 6 classes.