A hybrid fingerprint matcher

We describe a hybrid fingerprint matching scheme that uses both minutiae and ridge flow information to represent and match fingerprints. A set of 8 Gabor filters, whose spatial frequencies correspond to the average inter-ridge spacing in fingerprints, is used to capture the ridge strength at equally spaced orientations. A square tessellation of the filtered images is then used to construct an eight-dimensional feature map, called the ridge feature map. The ridge feature map along with the minutiae set of a fingerprint image is used for matching purposes. The genuine accept rate of the hybrid matcher is observed to be similar to 10% higher than that of a minutiae-based matcher at low false accept rates. Fingerprint verification using the hybrid matcher on a Pentium III (800 MHz) processor takes similar to 1.4 seconds.