Advances in fingerprint modeling

Although fingerprint recognition is a mature technology and nowadays commercial state-of-the-art systems can be successfully used in a number of real applications, not all the problems have been solved and the research is still very active in the field. Effectively dealing with fingerprint distortion is one of the problems that is currently attracting a lot of attention and it seems that accurate models of the finger skin are necessary to cope with the often undesired effects of distortion. This paper discusses the recent advances in fingerprint modeling and focuses on a specific model which proved to be particularly effective. Practical applications of this model to fingerprint synthesis and fake detection are also introduced.