INTRODUCTION

INTRODUCTION

GENERAL OVERVIEW
Biometrics, the science of applying unique physical or behavioral characteristics to verify an individual’s identity, is the basis for the variety of rapidly expanding applications for both data security and access control. Numerous Biometrics approaches currently exist, including voice recognition, Iris scanning, facial recognition and others but fingerprint recognition is increasingly being acknowledged as the most practical technology for low cost, convenient and reliable security.

Fingerprint comparison is a fundamental method for identification of people. Fingerprint identification is based on immutability and the individuality of fingerprints.

Because of the large collection of fingerprint images and recent advancement in computer technology there has been increasing interest in automatic classification of fingerprints.

Identification and verification is the process where by an unknown print is matched against all the prints. Verification is the matching of print from a known class to the prints of same class.