Data Compression of Fingerprint Minutiae

Biometric techniques have usual advantages over conventional personal identification technique. Among various commercially available biometric techniques such as face, fingerprint, Iris etc., fingerprint-based techniques are the most accepted recognition system. Fingerprints are trace or impression of patterns created by friction ridges of the skin in the fingers and thumbs. Steganography usually used in smart card is a safe technique for authenticating a person. In steganography, biometric characteristic similar to fingerprint is hidden in an picture. As the quantity of information that can be stored by means of steganography is extremely restricted, compression mechanisms are essential in order to achieve reasonably little errors when finally checking fingerprints against the encoded templates. To decrease the volume of smart card, compression can be applied to fingerprint template in order to make it take up fewer space. This paper is presenting the minutiae based inexpensive fingerprint compression technique. In minutiae based systems, the discontinuities in the regular ridge structure of fingerprint images are acknowledged in feature extraction step. During matching, a similarity value between the features extracted from the template and the enter fingerprint images is calculated. This similarity value is used to appear at an accept / reject decision. We present a new approach based on delta compression for robustly compressing the fingerprint templates.