Combining features and ancillary measures for exploring hereditary trends in fingerprints

This paper presents a method for exploring human hereditary relations by means of fingerprint images. Fingerprints are not inherited, even though the general patterns may appear to be the same in families but the various level features will differ and hence fingerprint is unique for each individual. This is true even for identical twins and clones. Until now, most of the research on fingerprints were mainly concentrating its potential use for biometric applications, criminal investigations and security purposes. Approach for developing hereditary relations from fingerprint is receiving enormous consideration in the contemporary days. In the reported work, an exercise has been made to investigate the presence of human hereditary association by analyzing the various fingerprint features and ancillary measures. Fingerprints are obtained from 75 subjects of 25 families comprising of a group of three generations. Fingerprints features of the right hand thumb, index and ring fingers were considered. Studies on ridge pattern type, orientation angle values, minutiae count, ridge count, ridge frequency, inter ridge width, matching score and finger ratio (ancillary measure) show that, the fingerprint feature vectors of intra-class family members show more correlation than the inter-class family members. The results obtained shows that there do exist strong genetic relations in fingertips and more engineering hours can be invested to obtain and establish solid hereditary relations from the fingerprints.