Minutiae-based Fingerprint Matching Using Subset Combination
Lifeng Sha, Feng Zhao, and Xiaoou Tang
Department of Information Engineering
The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Shatin, N.T., Hong Kong
{lfsha1, fzhao0, xtang}@ie.cuhk.edu.hk
Abstract
In this paper, we propose an effective fingerprint match-
ing algorithm based on ridge count matching and minutiae
subset combination. In the algorithm, the orientation-based
ridge patterns are first utilized to remove the spuriously
matched minutiae pairs. Then the reliable ridge counts
between every two minutiae are estimated to improve the
minutiae relationship, and finally the matched minutiae sub-
sets corresponding to different alignments are selectively
combined to reduce the influence caused by distortions in
fingerprints. Experimental results on NIST-4 show that our
method achieves a much better matching performance.
1. Introduction
The minutiae-based matching algorithms are widely
used in fingerprint recognition [8], which first extract the lo-
cal minutiae (ridge endings and ridge bifurcations) from the
thinned ridge map [4] or the grayscale image [7], and then
match their relative placement in the query fingerprint with
the stored template. In the past decades, various matching
techniques [3][6][9] have been proposed in the literature.
The fingerprint minutiae are traditionally represented by
three attributes: (i) x-coordinate, (ii) y-coordinate, and (iii)
local ridge direction (θ). To improve the reliability of global
matching, researchers proposed to match minutiae points
using not only the traditional features, but also the new fea-
tures such as orientation-based ridge patterns [12] and ridge
count between every two minutiae [2][5][10]. For each
ridge pattern, 14 orientation features are defined in [12]. Six
orientations are computed from the origin point to the six
points uniformly distributed along the ridge with a certain
interval. The other eight orientations are the average orien-
tations of the eight local areas centered at the eight nearby
points around the origin point. Such orientation-based ridge
patterns can greatly improve the minutiae local features.
Ridge count is the number of ridges between any two points
in the fingerprint image, which can be estimated by deter-
mining the number of 0-to-1 transitions along the connect-
The 18th International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR'06)
0-7695-2521-0/06 $20.00 © 2006
ing path in a binary image or by determining the number
of local maxima along the connecting path in a grayscale
image. Such features between every two minutiae are capa-
ble of representing the distinctive global spatial relationship
among minutiae and hence can improve the global matching
performance. However, the estimation of ridge count may
fail when the connecting path is nearly parallel to the local
ridge orientation or when it passes through a noisy area or
other minutiae field. To solve the problem, we propose a
new ridge count estimation algorithm that can reliably eval-
uate the ridge counts and drop those unreliable ones.
Due to the distortions in fingerprint images, the minu-
tiae sets extracted from the two impressions of the same
finger are usually matched partially no matter how they are
aligned. To reconstruct the mapping mechanism, several
approaches have been previously developed including nor-
malization [6] and 2D warping [1], but no best solution
is available due to the complexity and unpredictability of
the elastic distortions. Generally, different minutiae align-
ments produce different subsets of matched minutiae pairs,
but most genuine minutiae pairs can be covered by two or
three subsets. In this paper, we propose to obtain the op-
timal mapping result by combining the matched minutiae
subsets instead of estimating the mapping function itself.
Our subset combination-based algorithm can effectively al-
leviate the nonlinear distortion problem in fingerprints.
2. Feature Extraction
Feature extraction consists of minutiae extraction and
ridge count estimation. The thinned ridge map is scanned
for minutiae extraction according to the properties of cross-
ing number (CN) [11], and a post-processing algorithm is
then applied to eliminate the spurious minutiae points. For
minutiae feature representation, we adopt the orientation-
based ridge patterns [12], which can greatly improve the
minutiae local features. Such orientation-based ridge pat-
terns help remove more spuriously matched minutiae pairs,
thus speed up the minutiae alignment and matching.
After minutiae extraction and purification, the ridge
 2
1 3
0 1
0
4
5 ing, and (d) distortion removal by subset combination.
(a)
(a) (b)
(b)
Figure 1. The relative position code corre-
sponding to a minutia point. (a) Ridge bifur-
cation and (b) Ridge ending.
count can be estimated by the following steps,
1. Initialization: assign 0 to all the points in the minutiae
labeling image Lm and the ridge labeling image Lr , both
with the same size as the thinned ridge map.
2. Set the virtual minutiae to be the singular ridge points
(CN=2) that are not assigned as the real/recorded minutiae.
3. For every real or virtual minutia, assign the value of
the minutia sequence number to the surrounding pixels in a
pre-specified neighborhood in Lm .
4. For every ridge, assign the value of the ridge sequence
number to the corresponding connection point in Lr .
5. For each minutiae pair (Mi ,Mj ) that are very close to
each other, if there exists a connecting ridge, then go to step
6, otherwise go to step 7.
6. If the ridge turn around with a large angle, subdivide
the ridge into two parts at the middle point and estimate
the ridge count according to step 7, then restore the ridge
labeling image.
7. Check the paths from point Ai,a to point Bj,b , where
Ai,a (Bj,b ) is the first (second) minutia point or its neigh-
borhood point(s) within a specified distance on the associ-
ated ridge(s). If any path crosses other minutiae field in
Lm , drop the ridge count feature. If there are two paths
that cross different ridges (ignoring those associated with
the two minutiae), then drop the ridge count feature, other-
wise count the number of ridges along the connecting path.
Note that the three ridges associated with a ridge bifurcation
are treated as the same one.
8. Record the position codes of minutia Mj and Mi rela-
tive to minutia Mi and Mj respectively (as shown in Fig. 1).
The ridge count features are defined as,
r = [i, j, rc , pi , pj ]T , (1)
where i and j are the sequence number of minutia Mi and
minutia Mj respectively, rc is the ridge count value, pi and
pj denote the position code of Mj and Mi relative to Mi
and Mj , respectively.
In this way, only a small percentage of ridge count fea-
tures are recorded for later matching. These ridge count
features are of high reliability, and hence are capable of im-
proving the global matching performance.
The 18th International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR'06)
0-7695-2521-0/06 $20.00 © 2006
3. Fingerprint Matching
Fingerprint matching consists of four steps: (a) minutiae
alignment, (b) minutiae matching, (c) ridge count match-
For minutiae alignment and matching, we use the method
in [12]. In this section, we focus on ridge count matching
and subset combination.
3.1. Ridge Count Matching
Since only reliable ridge count features are recorded, it
is less reasonable to evaluate the ridge count matching score
by dividing the number of matched pairs by the maximum
number of ridge counts in the query fingerprint and the tem-
plate. Instead, we use the difference between the number
of matched and nonmatched pairs in the overlapping re-
gion only. For each ridge count rQ in the query fingerprint,
we search its corresponding mate rT in the overlapping re-
gion of the template, which means that the corresponding
four minutiae points must be matched as two pairs. If the
corresponding mate cannot be found, we ignore it instead
of treating it as nonmatched, otherwise we will estimate
whether they are matched or not as follows.
Without loss of generality, we assume (MiQ ,Mm T
) and
Q T
(Mj ,Mn ) are two matched minutiae pairs in the query fin-
gerprint and the template. If MiQ has the same type with
Mm T
and MjQ has the same type with MnT , the ridge count
pair rQ and rT can be easily judged as matched or not by
checking if the ridge count value rcQ and rcT are the same.
If MiQ and Mm T
are of different types, e.g., MiQ is a ridge
T
bifurcation and Mm is a ridge ending, the ridge count value
T
of Mm will be first adjusted according to different matching
conditions,
T
• If Mm matches the main ridge (code 0 in Fig. 1) of
Q
Mi , decrease rcT by one if the relative position code is 2,
3, or 4 (see Fig. 1).
T
• If Mm matches the first minor ridge (code 2 in Fig. 1)
Q
of Mi , decrease rcT by one if the relative position code is
0, 4, or 5 (see Fig. 1).
• If Mm T
matches the second minor ridge (code 4 in
Q
Fig. 1) of Mi , decrease rcT by one if the relative position
code is 0, 1, or 2 (see Fig. 1).
If MiQ is a ridge ending and Mm T
is a ridge bifurcation,
Q T
or in case of Mj and Mn with different types, a similar ad-
justment will be performed. After that, the ridge count pair
can be treated as matched if their modified ridge count val-
ues are the same, otherwise nonmatched. Fig. 2 shows some
examples of matched and nonmatched ridge count pairs.
Let M and N denote the number of minutiae in the query
fingerprint and the template respectively, Mpair denotes the
number of matched minutiae pairs, Cpair and C /pair denote
the number of matched ridge count pairs and nonmatched
ridge count pairs, respectively. The integrated matching
 1 1
5
4 4 5

(a) (b) 2 3 2 3

(a) (b)
1 1
1 1
55 55
44 44
(c) (d)
22 3 22 3
3 3
Figure 2. Examples of ridge count pairs. (a-b)
(c) (d)
matched, (c-d) nonmatched. 11 11 1
Query Template 5
Alignment Module 55 55
Minutiae Set Minutiae Set 44 4 44 5
4
22 33 22 33 2 33
Alignment 1 Alignment 2 Alignment k (e) (f) (g)

Figure 4. An example of subset combina-

Matched Matched
Minutiae Subset 1 Minutiae Subset 2
Subset Combination
Module
Matching Score
Figure 3. Flowchart of subset combination for
distortion removal.
score Ms is then computed by
Mpair + Cpair − C
/pair
Ms = . (2)
max(M, N ) + Cpair + C/pair
3.2. Subset Combination for Distortion Re-
moval
Generally, different minutiae alignments will result in
different subsets of matched minutiae pairs which remove
distortions in different local areas, but most genuine minu-
tiae pairs can be covered by two or three subsets. On the
other hand, the accumulation of distortion may result in
large distance alteration, but the effect in local area is rather
small and can be effectively solved by a pattern matching al-
gorithm [4] using a suitable bounding box. Based on these
observations, we propose an effective subset combination
scheme for distortion removal (see Fig. 3), which can avoid
inaccurate alignment and spurious minutiae pairs. In order
to save memory and matching time, the original matched
minutiae subsets corresponding to different alignments are
sorted in descending order according to the matching scores
as defined in equation (2), and only the top 10 subsets are
recorded and utilized for subset combination.
Let Si , Sj , and Sk be the matched minutiae subsets cor-
responding to three different alignments, Si,j be the combi-
nation of Si and Sj , Si,j,k be the combination of Si,j and
Sk . The final matching score Mf∗inal can be defined as,
Mf∗inal = max(Mf1 , Mf2 , Mf3 ),
Mf1 = max (Ms (Si )),
i: 1i10
M f2 = max (Ms (Si,j )),
i,j: 1i,j10
M f3 = max
i,j,k: 1i,j,k10
where Ms (·) is the matching score of a matched minutiae
subset as defined in equation (2).
Matched
Minutiae Subset k tion. (a)(b) two minutiae subsets, (c)(d) two
matched minutiae subsets corresponding to
two different alignments, (e)(f) correspond-
ing results after 2D warping, (g) the final ma-
tching result based on subset combination.
The combination of two subsets will be null (i.e., match-
ing score is 0) if they have less than three common minutiae
pairs, otherwise it will be defined as the union of the two
subsets except those spuriously matched minutiae pairs. In
case of one minutia matches two different minutiae or two
minutiae are very close but their mates in another subset
have a large distance, we will remove one of the two minu-
tiae pairs according to the following rules,
• If the two pairs make different ridge count contribu-
tions (Cpair − C /pair ), eliminate the one with a small con-
tribution.
• If the two pairs make the same ridge count contribution
(Cpair − C /pair ), eliminate the one with a smaller distance
from their nearest neighbors.
Fig. 4 shows a simple example to demonstrate the
effect of subset combination. The two minutiae sets
{M1 , M2 , M3 , M4 , M5 } and {M1 , M2 , M3 , M4 , M5 } can
be matched completely by combining the two matched
subsets {(M1 , M1 ), (M2 , M2 ), (M3 , M3 ), (M4 , M4 )} and
{(M1 , M1 ), (M2 , M2 ), (M3 , M3 ), (M5 , M5 )}, which cor-
respond to two different alignments.
4. Experiments
Experiments are conducted on a standard fingerprint
database NIST-4, which contains a set of 2000 fingerprint
image pairs (512×512, 500 dpi). Each fingerprint pair has
(3) two different rolled impressions of the same finger. The
overall matching performance is measured by the receiver
(4) operating characteristic (ROC) curve, which plots the gen-
(5) uine acceptance rate (GAR) against the false acceptance
rate (FAR) at different operating points (matching score
(Ms (Si,j,k )), (6) thresholds).
Fig. 5a shows the overall matching performance im-
proved by the ridge count features and Fig. 5b illustrates
the distribution of the imposturous and genuine matching

The 18th International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR'06)

0-7695-2521-0/06 $20.00 © 2006
 (a) (b) (a) without ridge count (b) with ridge count

Figure 5. (a) The ROC curves illustrating the
performance of ridge count features using
different models, (b) The distribution of the
imposturous and genuine matching scores
with (solid lines) and without (dotted lines)
integrating the ridge count features.
Subsets Combination
2D Warping
No Distortion Removal
Figure 7. Distribution of the imposturous and
genuine matching scores with (solid lines),
without (dotted lines) subset combination.
The ridge counts between every two minutiae are estimated
and the reliable ones are used to enhance the relationship
among minutiae, which increase the overall matching accu-
racy. Finally the matched minutiae subsets corresponding
to different alignments are selectively combined to further
Subsets Combination improve the matching performance by alleviating the non-
2D Warping
No Distortion Removal
linear distortion problem in fingerprints.

References
(a) without ridge count (b) with ridge count

Figure 6. The ROC curves of the subset com-
bination, 2D warping, and original method.
scores before and after integrating the ridge count features.
In the experiment, three ridge count models are constructed:
(1) reliable ridge count as described in Section 2, (2) un-
reliable ridge count where all the ridge counts are utilized
without evaluation, and (3) local ridge count where the ridge
count are not evaluated and only those ridge count connect-
ing the minutia and its three nearest neighbors are utilized.
It can be seen that the proposed ridge count mechanism out-
performs the other methods. Without evaluating the relia-
bility of the ridge count features, the matching performance
will drop drastically. In addition, the reliable ridge count
features greatly enlarge the genuine matching score while
slightly change the imposturous matching score, which re-
sults in an obvious decrease of the equal error rate (EER).
The results indicate that the reliable ridge count features are
capable of enhancing the global spatial relationship among
minutiae and hence improving the matching performance.
Fig. 6 illustrates the ROC curves of the subset combina-
tion compared with the 2D warping algorithm and the origi-
nal method without distortion removal. As can be seen from
the results, our subset combination scheme shows good ca-
pability of distortion removal and performs better than the
2D warping method. Furthermore, the subset combination
can effectively decrease the EER with almost no change to
the imposturous matching score, as shown in Fig. 7.
5. Conclusion
In this paper, we develop an effective fingerprint match-
ing algorithm based on ridge count matching and minutiae
subset combination. In our algorithm, the orientation-based
ridge patterns are utilized to improve the minutiae local fea-
tures for the removal of spuriously matched minutiae pairs.
[1] A. M. Bazen and S. H. Gerez. Fingerprint matching by
thin-plate spline modeling of elastic deformations. Pattern
Recognition, 36(8):1859–1867, 2003.
[2] Z. Chen and C. H. Kuo. A topology-based matching algo-
rithm for fingerprint authentication. In Proc. IEEE 25th An-
nual Int’l Carnahan Conf. Security Technology, pages 84–
87, 1991.
[3] A. K. Hrechak and J. A. Mchugh. Automated fingerprint
recognition using structural matching. Pattern Recognition,
23(8):893–904, 1990.
[4] A. K. Jain, L. Hong, and R. Bolle. On-line fingerprint veri-
fication. IEEE Trans. Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelli-
gence, 19(4):302–314, 1997.
[5] X. Jiang and W. Y. Yau. Fingerprint minutiae matching
based on local and global structures. In Proc. 15th Int’l Conf.
Pattern Recognition, volume 2, pages 1038–1041, 2000.
[6] D. Lee, K. Choi, and J. Kim. A robust fingerprint matching
algorithm using local alignment. In Proc. 16th Int’l Conf.
Pattern Recognition, volume 3, pages 803–806, 2002.
[7] D. Maio and D. Maltoni. Direct gray-scale minutiae detec-
tion in fingerprints. IEEE Trans. Pattern Analysis and Ma-
chine Intelligence, 19(1):27–40, 1997.
[8] D. Maltoni, D. Maio, A. K. Jain, and S. Prabhakar. Hand-
book of Fingerprint Recognition. Springer-Verlag, New
York, 2003.
[9] N. Ratha, S. Chen, K. Karu, and A. K. Jain. A
real-time matching system for large fingerprint databases.
IEEE Trans. Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence,
18(8):799–813, 1996.
[10] N. K. Ratha, V. D. Pandit, R. M. Bolle, and V. Vaish. Robust
fingerprint authentication using local structural similarity. In
Fifth IEEE Workshop on Applications of Computer Vision,
pages 29–34, 2000.
[11] D. Rutovitz. Pattern recognition. J. Roy. Statist. Soc.,
129:504–530, 1966.
[12] L. Sha and X. Tang. Orientation-improved minutiae for fin-
gerprint matching. In Proc. 17th Int’l Conf. Pattern Recog-
nition, volume 4, pages 432–435, 2004.

The 18th International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR'06)

0-7695-2521-0/06 $20.00 © 2006