A Study on Strong Minutiae Extraction for Secure and Rapid Fingerprint Authentication

Fingerprints are increasingly used for user authentication in small devices such as mobile phones. Therefore, it is important for Fingerprint authentication systems in personal devices to protect the user's fingerprint information while performing efficiently with a lightweight matching algorithm. In this paper, we propose a new method to extract strong minutiae with unique numbers from fingerprint images. Strong minutiae are at all times obtained from fingerprint images, and can be useful for secure and rapid fingerprint authentication. The binary information of strong minutiae of a fingerprint can be transformed securely and can create cancelable fingerprint templates. Also the bit-strings of strong minutiae decrease computing time necessary for the matching procedure between two fingerprints due to the simplicity of bitwise operations. First, we enroll several fingerprints images of a finger. From these images we select a reference fingerprint and put a number on each minutia. Following this procedure, we search for mated-minutiae between the reference fingerprint and other fingerprints one by one. Finally we derive unique numbers of strong minutiae of the finger. In the experiment with the FVC2004 fingerprint database, we show that using the proposed method, strong minutiae can be extracted successfully.