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Fingerprint Recognition, Overview

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Encyclopedia of Biometrics

Synonym

Fingerprint Biometric

Definition

Fingerprint recognition allows a person to be verified or identified through the analysis and comparison of his or her finger dermal ridges. Fingerprint recognition was one of the first techniques used for automatically identifying people and today is still one of the most popular and effective biometric techniques.

Introduction

A fingerprint is the representation of the dermal ridges of a finger [1]. Dermal ridges form through a combination of genetic and environmental factors; the genetic code in DNA gives general instructions on the way skin should form in a developing fetus, but the specific way it forms is a result of random events such as the exact position of the fetus in the womb at a particular moment. This is the reason why even the fingerprints of identical twins are different [2]. Fingerprints are fully formed at about 7 months of fetus development and finger ridge configurations do not change throughout the life of an individual,...

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References

  1. Maltoni, D., Maio, D., Jain, A.K., Prabhakar, S.: Handbook of fingerprint recognition. Springer, New York (2003)

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  2. Jain, A.K., Prabhakar, S., Pankanti, S.: On the similarity of identical twin fingerprints. Pattern Recognit. 35(11), 2653–2663 (2002)

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  3. Pankanti, S., Prabhakar, S., Jain, A.K.: On the individuality of fingerprints. IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell. 24(8), 1010–1025 (2002)

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  4. The Fourth International Fingerprint Verification Competition (FVC2006) http://bias.csr.unibo.it/fvc2006.

  5. Lee, H.C., Gaensslen, R.E.: Advances in fingerprint technology. 2nd Edn. Elsevier, New York (2001).

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  6. Cappelli, R., Lumini, A., Maio, D., Maltoni, D.: Fingerprint image reconstruction from standard templates. IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell. 29(9), 1489–1503 (2007)

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. DEIS, University of Bologna,  , Italy

    Davide Maltoni

Authors
  1. Davide Maltoni
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Biometrics and Security Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    Stan Z. Li (Professor) (Professor)

  2. Departments of Computer Science & Engineering, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA

    Anil Jain (Professor) (Professor)

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© 2009 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC

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Maltoni, D. (2009). Fingerprint Recognition, Overview. In: Li, S.Z., Jain, A. (eds) Encyclopedia of Biometrics. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-73003-5_47

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