Implementation and evaluation of NIST Biometric Image Software for fingerprint recognition

Fingerprints are rich in details which are in the form of discontinuities in ridges known as minutiae and are unique for each person. This paper describes implementation and evaluation of an existing fingerprint recognition system in MATLAB environment. The selected system is developed by National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) denoted as Biometric Image Software (NBIS). The NBIS source code is written in ANSI C programming language. To be able to evaluate the algorithm in MATLAB a C language MEX-files has been used. The NBIS support both minutiae extraction and minutiae matching functions that have been employed in the evaluation. The implemented system has been tested on a Fingerprint Verification Competition (FVC) database. The results are presented as Receiver Operating Characteristics (ROC) graphs.