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An investigation on the problem of thinning in fingerprint processing


IO Avaziomeiza

Abstract

A high-integrity thinning procedure for binarised fingerprints is proposed in this paper. Several authors and software developers have approached the thinning problems in fingerprint-processing differently. Their approach produced in most cases, fingerprint skeletons with low reli abi lity and thus require additional minutiae-pruning stage to discard the erroneous minutiae in the obtained skeletons. The work involves a careful blending of some already existing algori thms to achieve optimal pe rform~nce. in th inning binarised .fingerprint images. The algorithms considered are as follows. The ·'Zhang and Suen'· paral lel algori thm for thinn ing digital patterns, the im proved parallel chinning algorithm by Holt and company and template-based thinning algorithm by Stentiford and Mortimer. The idea of combining these stand-alone algorithms to improve the quality of obtained objects skeleton in general image process ing was first suggested in a text by Parker in 1998. However, his work does not specifically address the fingerprint problem. This work has examined and proves the plausibi lity of this thinning approach in the particular case of fingerprint application domain. The thinning procedure obtained satisfactory skeletons for fingerprint applications.

Keywords: Fingerprint, Thinning, Minutiae, Digital-pattern, Ske leton


Journal Identifiers


eISSN: 2437-2110
print ISSN: 0189-9546