Fingerprint matching by thin-plate spline modelling of elastic deformations

This paper presents a novel minutiae matching method that describes elastic distortions in fingerprints by means of a thin-plate spline model, which is estimated using a local and a global matching stage. After registration of the fingerprints according to the estimated model, the number of matching minutiae can be counted using very tight matching thresholds. For deformed fingerprints, the algorithm gives considerably higher matching scores compared to rigid matching algorithms, while only taking 100 ms on a 1 GHz P-III machine. Furthermore, it is shown that the observed deformations are different from those described by theoretical models proposed in the literature. (C) 2003 Pattern Recognition Society. Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.