Gradient based textural characterization of fingerprints

Though a lot of research has been done to match fingerprints, most existing approaches rely on locations of minutiae features for matching tasks. Relatively, little effort has gone into utilizing textural information present in fingerprints as distinguishing characteristic. In this paper, we propose a novel gradient-based approach to characterize textural information in fingerprints for the task of biometric matching. In particular, the proposed approach uses histograms of oriented gradients (HOGs) to represent minutiae neighborhoods. The minutiae neighborhoods are divided into several regions to make the computed histograms distinguishing and robust at the same time. Experimental results are provided to show the efficacy of the proposed characterization. © 2008 IEEE.