A modified thinning algorithm for fingerprint identification systems

Abstract

A critical step in fingerprint identification system is the thinning of the input fingerprint image. The performance of a minutiae extraction algorithm relies heavily on the quality of the thinning algorithm. In this paper, a fast fingerprint thinning algorithm is introduced. The algorithm works directly on the gray-scale image not the binarized one where binarization of fingerprint causes many spurious minutiae and also removes many important features. The performance of the thinning algorithm is evaluated using many fingerprint images. Experimental results show that the proposed thinning algorithm is both fast and accurate.