Introductory Chapter: On Fingerprint Recognition

*Muhammad Sarfraz*

### **1. Introduction**

The biometric phrase means life measurement in the Greek language [1]. That is any technique used for measuring biological information for recognition goals called biometric. There are various kinds of biometrics being used, these include Fingerprint, Face, Speaker/Voice, Infrared thermogram (facial, hand or hand vein), Gait, Keystroke, Odor, Ear, Hand geometry, Retina, Iris, Palmprint, Signature, DNA, Knuckle crease, Brain/EEG, Heart sound/ECG. Defining humans using biometric can even be behavioral or physiological biometrics. The difference between them is that behavioral biometric can be affected with the progress of the time such as signature, gait, speech, and keystroke but the physiological biometric are constant during human life. Fingerprint, face, iris, and palmprints are examples of physiological biometric [2]. A Biometric system is reliable because it cannot be stolen, borrow, bought, or forgotten like a password or ID [3].

The fingerprint is a physical biometric aspect. It is used to identify a person's identity due to its uniqueness where no two persons can share the same fingerprint. Besides, a fingerprint is unchangeable with time and can be easily recognized during the whole life of the individual. The fingerprint is an impression or model of ribs and valleys at the top of a person's fingers. **Figure 1** shows a fingerprint pattern. Fingerprint recognition is the automatic prosses of comparing saved fingerprint pattern with the input fingerprint to determine human characters. Although fingerprint recognition was deployed from decade it became one of the most common biometric nowadays. The fingerprint identification system is a cheap but solid mechanism at the same time. Moreover, it's a simple way to identify humans speedily and accurately [4]. Many applications applied fingerprint recognition such as the military, judiciary, health, teaching, civic serving, mobiles and laptop log-in, and many more. Modern techniques and approaches are used recently as a substituted of old ink to capture the fingerprint. These technologies differ

**Figure 1.** *A fingerprint model.*

in terms of accuracy, effectiveness, speed, advantages, and challenges [5]. This chapter discusses, compares and analyses several authors work [1–27] regarding the fingerprint recognition.

The remaining of the chapter is organized as follows. Section 2 is an overview of the literature survey with comparative research. Section 3 deals with a detailed analytical study of the literature review. At last, future directions, recommendations, and conclusion are presented in Section 4.
