AN IDENTITY-AUTHENTICATION SYSTEM USING FINGERPRINTS

Fingerprint verification is an important biometric technique for perso nal identification, In this paper, we describe the design and implemen tation of a prototype automatic identity-authentication system that us es fingerprints to authenticate the identity of an individual. We have developed an improved minutiae-extraction algorithm that is faster an d more accurate than our earlier algorithm [58]. An alignment-based mi nutiae-matching algorithm has been proposed. 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 compensate adaptively for the nonlinear deformations and inexact tran sformations between an input and a template. To establish an objective assessment of our system, both the Michigan State University and the National Institute of Standards and Technology NIST 9 fingerprint data bases have been used to estimate the performance numbers. The experim ental results reveal that our system can achieve a good performance on these data bases. We also have demonstrated that our system satisfies the response-time requirement, A complete authentication procedure, o n average, takes about 1.4 seconds on a Slut ULTRA 1 workstation (it i s expected to run as fast or faster on a 200 HMz Pentium [7]).