New Ridge Flux Analysis for Fingerprint Minutiae Detection

This paper presents a new fingerprint minutiae extraction approach that is based on the analysis of the ridge flux distribution. The considerable processing time taken by the conventional approaches, most of which use the ridge thinning process with a rather large calculation time, is a problem that has recently attracted increased attention. We observe that the features of a ridge curve are very similar to those of a vector flux such as a line of electric force or a line of magnetic force. In the proposed approach, vector flux analysis is applied to detect minutiae without using the ridge thinning process in order to reduce the computation time. The experimental results show that the proposed approach can achieve a reduction in calculation time, while achieving the same success detection rate as that of the conventional approaches.