Fingerprint Biometrics
Fingerprint recognition was one of the first machine-solved automatic technologies. Human fingertips contain ridges and valleys which together forms distinctive patterns. These patterns are fully developed during pregnancy and are permanent throughout the whole lifetime. Injuries like cuts and burns can temporarily damage the quality of fingerprints but they will be fully restored when fully healed.
Fingerprint recognition is the automatic prosses of comparing saved fingerprint patterns with the input fingerprint to determine human characters. Although fingerprint recognition was deployed from decade it became one of the most common biometrics nowadays. The fingerprint identification system is a cheap but solid mechanism simultaneously. Moreover, it’s a simple way to identify humans speedily and accurately. Many applications applied fingerprint recognition such as the military, judiciary, health, teaching, civic serving, mobile and laptop log-in, and many more.
The method that is selected for fingerprint matching was first discovered by Sir Francis Galton. In 1888 he observed that fingerprints are rich in details also called minutiae in form of discontinuities in ridges. He also noticed that position of those minutiae doesn’t change over time. Therefore minutiae matching are a good way to establish if two fingerprints are from the same person or not.
Recognition works by extracting meaningful features known as minutia points from the fingerprint. The scanner picks out attributes such as orientation, change of ridge direction, arches, loops, and whorls in the print. Some scanners can even pick up pores on the skin. The software then records and stores these minutia points in order to verify the user’s identity in the future.
The two most important minutiae are termination and bifurcation, termination, which is the immediate ending of a ridge; the other is called bifurcation, which is the point on the ridge from which two branches derive.