An identity-authentication system using fingerprints

ingerprint verification is an important biometric technique for personal identification. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of a prototype automatic identity-authentication system that uses fingerprints to authenticate the identity of an individual We have developed an improved minutiae-extraction algorithm that is faster and more accurate than our earlier algorithm [58]. An alignment-based minutiae-matching algorithm has been proposed. This algorithm is capable of finding the correspondences between input minutiae and the stored template without resorting to exhaustive search and has the ability to compensate adoptively for the nonlinear deformations and inexact transformations between an input and a template. To establish an objective assessment of our system, both the Michigan State University and the National Institute of Standards and Technology ,NIST 9 fingerprint data bases have been used to estimate the performance numbers. The experimental results reveal that our system can achieve a good performance on these data bases. We also have demonstrated that our system satisfies the response-time requirement. A complete authentication procedure, on average, takes about 1.4 seconds on a Sun ULTRA 1 workstation (it is expected to run as fast or faster on a 200 HMz Pentium [7]). © 1997 IEEE.