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Brief history
Fingerprints have been scientifically studied for many years in
our society. The characteristics of
fingerprints were studied as early as 1600s. Meanwhile, using
fingerprints as a means of identification first
occurred in the mid-1800s. Sir William Herschel, in 1859,
discovered that fingerprints do not change over time and
that each pattern is unique to an individual. With these
findings, he was the first to implement a system using
fingerprints and handprints to identify an individual in 1877.
By 1896, police forces in India realized the benefit of
using fingerprints to identify criminals, and they began
collecting the fingerprints of prisoners along with their
other measurements.
With a growing database of fingerprint images, it soon became
desirable to havean efficient manner of
classifying the various images. Between 1896 and 1897, SirEdward
Henry developed the Henry Classification
System, which quickly foundworldwide acceptance within a few
years. This system allows for logical
categorizationof a complete set of the ten fingerprint images
for a person. By establishing groupingsbased on
fingerprint pattern types, the Henry System greatly reduces the
effort ofsearching a large database. Until the mid-
1990s, many organizations continued to usethe Henry
Classification System to store their physical files of
fingerprint images.
As fingerprints began to be utilized in more fields, the number
of requests forfingerprint matching began
to increase on a daily basis. At the same time, the size ofthe
databases continued to expand with each passing
day. Therefore, it soon becamedifficult for teams of fingerprint
experts to provide accurate results in a timely
manner. Inthe early 1960s, the FBI, Home Office in the United
Kingdom, and Paris PoliceDepartment began to
devote a large amount of resources in developing
automaticfingerprint identification systems. These systems
allowed for an improvement inoperational productivity among law
enforcement agencies. At the same time,
theautomated systems reduced funding requirements to hire and
train human fingerprintexperts. Today,
automatic fingerprint recognition technology can be found in a
widerange of civilian applications.
Fingerprint details
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In this section structure and detail about fingerprint image
will be explained. We will emphasize and give
greater detail of only those terminologies which are related to
our project.
What is a fingerprint?
A fingerprint is the feature pattern of ones finger as shown in
figure below. It isbelieved with strong evidence that
these feature patterns are unique for each individual.So each
individual has its own fingerprint with permanent
uniqueness. Thats whyfingerprints have been used for
identification and forensic investigation for a long time.
Fingerprint features
A fingerprint pattern is composed of a sequence of ridges and
valleys. In a fingerprint image, the ridges
appear as dark lines while the valleys are the light areas
between the ridges. A cut or burn to a finger does not
affect the underlying ridge structure, and the original pattern
will be reproduced when new skin grows. Ridges
and valleys generally run parallel to each other, and their
patterns can be analyzed on a global and local level.Ridges and
valleysgenerallyrun parallel to each other, and theirpatterns can
be analyzed on a global and local
level.
Global levelAt theglobal level, the fingerprint image will have
one ormoreregions where theridge lines have a distinctive
shape
Local level
While the global level allows for a general classification of
fingerprints, analyzing the image at the local
level provides a significant amount of detail. These details are
obtained by observing the locations where a ridge
becomes discontinuous, known as minutiae points. Our project is
also based on the minutiae based recognition.Themost common types
ofminutiae areshown in Figure below.
