On the Effects of Image Quality Degradation on Minutiae- and Ridge-Based Automatic Fingerprint Recognition

The effect of image quality degradation on the verification performance of automatic fingerprint recognition is investigated. We study the performance of two fingerprint matchers based on minutiae and ridge information under varying fingerprint image quality. The ridge-based system is found to be more robust to image quality degradation than the minutiae-based system for a number of different image quality criteria.