Minutiae filtering using ridge-valley method

Abstract

In order to identify subjects in a convenient and efficient way one must use some special feature that makes it possible to discriminate between persons. Some of the features are biometric in nature, such as iris texture, hand shape, the human face, and of course finger prints. These play an important role in many automatic identification systems, since every person is believed to have a unique set of fingerprints. Before a fingerprint image can be looked up in a database, it has to be classified into one of 5 types in order to reduce processing times.