Monday, 30 June 2025

Unlocking Fingerprint Intelligence: Extracting Ridge, Minutiae, and DWT Features | Chapter 7 | New Horizons of Science, Technology and Culture Vol. 2

A fingerprint image captures the unique spatial pattern of ridges and valleys on the human fingertip, serving as a powerful and widely adopted A fingerprint image is a digital representation of the intricate and unique spatial configuration of ridges and valleys found on the human fingertip. These patterns are distinct for every individual and remain virtually unchanged throughout a person’s life, making fingerprints one of the most reliable forms of biometric identification. Their inherent individuality and permanence have made fingerprint recognition systems indispensable across a wide range of applications, including forensic investigations, national identity verification programs, secure access control systems, and personal device authentication.

 

This chapter, inspired by advancements in biometric sciences, anthropometry, and computational pattern recognition, investigates refined and more efficient methods of extracting rich and diverse features from fingerprint images. The emphasis lies on enhancing the accuracy and reliability of classification and identification tasks by focusing on extracting ridge information, minutiae patterns, and Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) features. These advanced features not only facilitate accurate fingerprint matching but also enable the derivation of soft biometric indicators such as gender, age, and potentially even blood type. This opens up promising avenues for the development of lightweight, non-invasive, and cost-effective biometric classification systems, which are particularly valuable in resource-constrained settings.

 

Fingerprint-based systems offer several key advantages over other biometric modalities, such as iris scans, facial recognition, or voice analysis. They typically require less storage space, involve simpler data acquisition procedures, and demand relatively low computational resources. These attributes make fingerprint recognition an ideal candidate for large-scale biometric applications, especially in densely populated or economically limited regions. The methodology explored in this chapter revolves around an automated framework that systematically analyses the spatial and structural features of fingerprints. It leverages both spatial domain and frequency domain analysis techniques to achieve a high-fidelity representation of fingerprint traits. By focusing on the precise extraction of ridge flows and minutiae points such as bifurcations and endings, and further enriching this representation with wavelet-based descriptors, the approach ensures robustness across various acquisition conditions, including variations in scanner types, resolutions, lighting conditions, and finger orientation.

 

Unlike traditional systems that rely solely on features such as ridge counts, thickness, and basic minutiae, the proposed approach employs enhanced feature extraction strategies that significantly improve identification accuracy. Through the application of Discrete Wavelet Transform, fingerprint images are analysed at multiple resolutions, enabling the capture of both global and fine-grained local details. This multiresolution capability allows the system to identify subtle fingerprint variations that might otherwise go undetected, making the overall classification more precise and resilient. Further, ridge structure is assessed in terms of quantifiable metrics like minimum, maximum, and average ridge lengths across the fingerprint. These measurements add another layer of distinguishing information, especially useful in scenarios where individuals have similar minutiae layouts but different ridge formations. In addition to these features, a rich set of minutiae descriptors-such as the number of ridge bifurcations, ridge endings, and total minutiae points-is extracted to enhance the discriminatory capability of the system.

 

By integrating these diverse features-spatial, geometric, and frequency-based-into a cohesive fingerprint recognition pipeline, this chapter presents a powerful and holistic approach to automated fingerprint classification. The comprehensive feature representation facilitates accurate and efficient matching of test fingerprint samples with stored templates, making the system suitable for use in high-security environments, law enforcement databases, and scalable authentication solutions.

 

In essence, this chapter contributes to the ongoing evolution of biometric technologies by introducing refined feature extraction techniques that enhance the reliability and versatility of fingerprint-based systems. The emphasis on improved accuracy, computational efficiency, and adaptability underscores the relevance of these techniques in shaping the future of secure and intelligent biometric identification.

 

Author(s) Details

 

Sayed Abulhasan Quadri
SECAB Institute of Engineering and Technology, Vijayapura, India.

 

Chandrakant P. Divate
SECAB Institute of Engineering and Technology, Vijayapura, India.

 

Tabasum Guledgudd
SECAB Institute of Engineering and Technology, Vijayapura, India.

 

Sayed Abdulhayan
PACE College, Mangalore, India.

 

 

Please see the book here:- https://doi.org/10.9734/bpi/nhstc/v2/5744

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