The Use of Top-View Finger Image for Personal Identification

This paper describes a feasibility study for using a top-view finger image to increase the accuracy of fingerprint recognition without adding any new user operations. A CCD camera captures a top-view finger image while the user is touching a fingerprint sensor, and the acquired gray scale image is preprocessed to enhance the edges, the skin furrows, and the nail shape before the image is filtered by a bank of oriented-filters. A square tessellation is applied to the filtered image to create a feature map, called a NailCode. The NailCode is employed in the matching process by employing a Euclidean distance computation. The experiment reveals that personal identification accuracy using NailCode feature is 96.57%. It is recommended that NailCode is employed in conjunction with fingerprint for multimodal biometric [1] systems will increase the identification accuracy.