An energy-based fingerprint matching system

In this paper, we present a new energy-based fingerprint matching system which uses both minutiae information available in a fingerprint with the information of the local ridges in their vicinity. The basic idea of this system is to divide the fingerprint matching problem into several small sub-problems that involve the use of image energy minimization for which an iterative schema is devised. At each minimization step this schema optimizes its local energy according to the previous estimate and the observed image features. Energy vectors are produced which represent the fingerprint image. Our system was tested on NIST 4 fingerprints and showed promising results.