Fingerprint based authentication application using visual cryptography methods (Improved ID card)

The main idea of this paper is to efficiently apply the Visual Cryptography (VC) techniques onto the area of authentication using fingerprints. We present an alternative approach of using the fingerprints, attempting to solve two major problems related to fingerprint based automatic access control systems, which are falsification and the costly maintenance of the large fingerprint database. In the proposed application we divide an input fingerprint image into two shares with the help of the basic VC techniques, keeping one with the participant in the form of ID card and saving the other one in the database. This share kept in the database will be the same for all of the participants. While accessing, we will stack the corresponding shares together and compare the obtained image with the provided fresh fingerprint using any modern minutia extraction algorithm.