On-line fingerprint verification

We describe the design and implementation of an online fingerprint verification system which operates in two stages: (i) minutia extraction and (ii) minutia matching. An improved minutia extraction algorithm that is much faster and more accurate than our earlier algorithm has been implemented. For minutia matching, an alignment-based elastic matching algorithm has been developed. This algorithm is capable of finding the correspondences between input minutiae and the stored template without resorting to exhaustive search and has the ability to adaptively compensate for the nonlinear deformations and inexact pose transformations between finger prints. The system has been tested on two sets of finger print images captured with inkless scanners. The verification accuracy is found to be over 99% with a 15% reject rate. Typically, a complete fingerprint verification procedure takes, on an average, about 8 seconds on a SPARC 20 workstation. It meets the response time requirements of on-line verification with high accuracy