| The fingerprint (FP) provides an optimal foundation for Automatic Personal Identification Systems (APIS). Over the last two decades significant progress in Automatic Fingerprint Identification Systems (AFIS) has been achieved. However, the performance of AFIS still suffers from the FP image quality captured by FP sensors, the enhancement techniques for FP images and feature extraction, and the available approaches of feature encoding and matching.; Although today's technology offers FP sensors which produce good quality images of FPs, more reliable approaches for FP image encoding and matching are strongly recommended for increasing the AFIS accuracy. Also more adaptive techniques for feature extraction are needed for increasing the system performance. In this research work a new approach for FP image encoding and matching is presented. The approach is mainly to enhance the accuracy of AFIS by considering almost all the rich discriminatory information available in the FP. The dissertation also presents a new enhancement technique for FP image based on the Multi-Scale Ridge Filter (MSRF). |
