A statistical study on the fingerprint minutiae distribution

Fingerprint minutiae distribution is the key issue of fingerprint individuality study. A method for studying fingerprint minutiae distribution by analyzing their second order statistical properties is proposed in this paper. Experiments have been performed on 467 different fingerprints selected from three major fingerprint databases. Results show that fingerprint minutiae tend to overdisperse on a small scale; and cluster on a large scale. Our findings which have successfully explained and unified various previous research observations should enlighten the study of fingerprint minutiae pattern modeling, an important foundation for boosting improvement in the fingerprint authentication technology.