Effective Morphological Extraction of True Fingerprint Minutiae Based on the Hit or Miss Transform

Fingerprints are the most widely used parameter for personal identification amongst all biometrics based personal authentication systems. As most Automatic Fingerprint Recognition Systems are based on local ridge features known as minutiae, marking minutiae accurately and rejecting false ones is critically important. In this paper the authors propose an algorithm for extracting minutiae from a fingerprint image using the binary Hit or Miss Transform (HMT) of mathematical morphology. The authors have developed and tested structuring elements for different types of minutiae present in a fingerprint image to be used by the HMT after preprocessing the image with morphological operators.