Fingerprint matching based on global alignment of multiple reference minutiae

Fingerprint matching is an important problem in fingerprint identification. A set of minutiae is usually used to represent a fingerprint. Most existing fingerprint identification systems match two fingerprints using minutiae-based method. Typically, they choose a reference minutia from the template fingerprint and the query fingerprint, respectively. When matching the two sets of minutiae, the template and the query, firstly reference minutiae pair is aligned coordinately and directionally, and secondly the matching score of the rest minutiae is evaluated. This method guarantees satisfactory alignments of regions adjacent to the reference minutiae. However, the alignments of regions far away from the reference minutiae are usually not so satisfactory. In this paper, we propose a minutia matching method based on global alignment of multiple pairs of reference minutiae. These reference minutiae are commonly distributed in various fingerprint regions. When matching, these pairs of reference minutiae are to be globally aligned, and those region pairs far away from the original reference minutiae will be aligned more satisfactorily. Experiment shows that this method leads to improvement in system identification performance.