International Journal of Computer Theory and Engineering

Abstract

Automatic and reliable extraction of the minutiae from fingerprint images is a critical process in fingerprint matching and a main preprocess for this stage is Thinning. There are a lot of algorithms for fingerprint thinning procedure. All of the previously proposed thinning methods try to thin every ridge due to the content of its central pixel and then extracting minutiae based on some other algorithms for denoising and preventing false minutiae detections at islands or spurities. If an algorithm could thin fingerprint ridges except unrecoverable corrupted regions and also could eliminate noise, it will be considered as a good thinning one and no additional processes are needed before minutiae extraction. The proposed method of this paper has such abilities. The proposed algorithm is implemented by applying four boxes of matrices; each of them thins ridges due to a specific direction; i.e., diagonal, horizontal and vertical directions. The proposed algorithm also is able to thin discrete Latin Characters or symbols. For evaluating the proposed method, several robust and reliable experiments have been employed and the results confirm the higher ability of the proposed method in comparison with the other competing one.