Crease detection from fingerprint images and its applications in elderly people

Conventional algorithms for fingerprint recognition are mainly based on minutiae information. But it is difficult to extract minutiae accurately and robustly for elderly people, and one of the main reasons is that there are many creases on the fingertips of elderly people. In this paper, we study on the detection of creases from fingerprint images, in which we treat the creases as a special kind of texture and design an optimal filter to extract them. We also study the applications of crease detection results to improve the performance of fingerprint recognition in elderly people, which include two aspects. First, it is used to remove the falsely detected minutiae. Second, the creases can be treated as a novel feature for elderly people's fingerprints, which is combined with minutiae feature to improve the performance. Experimental results illustrate the effectiveness of proposed methods.