Review of Touch-Less Fingerprint Recognition Technologies

Fingerprint recognition has aided variety of biometric security applications over past few decades. Each person possesses unique fingerprint characteristic in terms of minutia, pore, ridges and patterns. Based on data acquisition methods fingerprint recognition can be touch based or touch less, with later having advantage in terms of better hygiene, safety and stray fingerprints. In Touch-less fingerprint recognition, fingerprints are acquired using a high resolution digital camera or any other optical acquisition system. Such systems find applications in numerous fields such as secure access to laptops, computer systems, cellular phones, banking, ATMs etc. Deceiving the simple appearance various taxing, such as non-uniform light, movement blurriness, defocus and low contrast between ridges and valley etc. To overcome such problems, it is important to focus more on the pre-processing steps. Touch-less fingerprint detection can be classified as two-dimensional and three-dimensional methods depending upon number of cameras used for acquisition of finger-print image. Literature presents different techniques for acquisition and analysis of finger-print images. In this paper, an effort is being made to review some of these techniques and give a brief comparison for the same in terms of accuracy, merits, demerits and their respective solution.