Detecting the fingerprint minutiae by adaptive tracing the gray-level ridge

This paper presents a minutiae detection procedure based on adoptive tracin g the gray-level ridge of the fingerprint image with piecewise linear lines of different length. The original finger print image is smoothed with an a daptive-oriented smoothing filter only at some selected points. This will g reatly reduce the computational time. Each ridge in the skeleton is labeled with a number so that each detected minutia is associated with one or two ridge numbers, which is useful for post processing. We objectively assess t he performance of this approach by using two large fingerprint databases. ( C) 2001 Pattern Recognition Society. Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.