BIOMETRICS: FINGERPRINT RECOGNITION

Accurate automatic personal identification is critical in a variety of applications in our
electronically interconnected society. Biometrics, which refers to identification based
on physical or behavioral characteristics, is being increasingly adopted to provide
positive identification with a high degree of confidence. Among all the biometric
techniques, fingerprint-based authentication systems have received the most attention
because of the long history of fingerprints and their extensive use in forensics.
However, the numerous fingerprint systems currently available still do not meet the
stringent performance requirements of several important civilian applications. To
assess the performance limitations of popular minutiae-based fingerprint verification
system, we theoretically estimate the probability of a false correspondence between
two fingerprints from different fingers based on the minutiae representation of
fingerprints. Due to the limited amount of information present in the minutiae-based
representation, it is desirable to explore alternative representations of fingerprints.