jidnya shah

We show that minutiae information can reveal substantial details such as the orientation field and the class of the associated fingerprint that can potentially be used to reconstruct the original fingerprint image. The proposed technique utilizes minutiae triplet information to estimate the orientation map of the parent fingerprint. The estimated orientation map is observed to be remarkably consistent with the underlying ridge flow. We next discuss a classification technique that utilizes minutiae information alone to infer the class of the fingerprint. Preliminary results indicate that the seemingly random minutiae distribution of a fingerprint can reveal important class information. Furthermore, contrary to what has been claimed by several minutiae-based fingerprint system vendors, we demonstrate that the minutiae template of a user may be used to reconstruct fingerprint images.

Most fingerprint-based biometric systems store the minutiae template of a user in the database. It has been traditionally assumed that the minutiae template of a user does not reveal any information about the original fingerprint. In this paper, we challenge this notion and show that three levels of information about the parent fingerprint can be elicited from the minutiae template alone, viz., 1) the orientation field information, 2) the class or type information, and 3) the friction ridge structure. The orientation estimation algorithm determines the direction of local ridges using the evidence of minutiae triplets. The estimated orientation field, along with the given minutiae distribution, is then used to predict the class of the fingerprint. Finally, the ridge structure of the parent fingerprint is generated using streamlines that are based on the estimated orientation field. Line integral convolution is used to impart texture to the ensuing ridges, resulting in a ridge map resembling the parent fingerprint. The salient feature of this noniterative method to generate ridges is its ability to preserve the minutiae at specified locations in the reconstructed ridge map. Experiments using a commercial fingerprint matcher suggest that the reconstructed ridge structure bears close resemblance to the parent fingerprint