• Journal of the Korea Society for Simulation
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• v.19 no.1
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• pp.143-151
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• 2010

Fingerprint classification is a step to increase the efficiency of an 1:N fingerprint recognition system and plays a role to reduce the matching time of fingerprint and to increase accuracy of recognition. It is difficult to classify fingerprints, because the ridge pattern of each fingerprint class has an overlapping characteristic with more than one class, fingerprint images may include a lot of noise and an input condition is an exceptional case. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to design a stochastic model and to accomplish fingerprint classification using a directional characteristic of fingerprints for an effective classification of various qualities. We compute the directional value by searching a fingerprint ridge pixel by pixel and extract a directional characteristic by merging a computed directional value by fixed pixels unit. The modified Markov model of each fingerprint class is generated using Markov model which is a stochastic information extraction and a recognition method by extracted directional characteristic. The weight list of classification model of each class is decided by analyzing the state transition matrixes of the generated Markov model of each class and the optimized value which improves the performance of fingerprint classification using GA (Genetic Algorithm) is estimated. The performance of the optimized classification model by GA is superior to the model before the optimization by the experiment result of applying the fingerprint database of various qualities to the optimized model by GA. And the proposed method effectively achieved fingerprint classification to exceptional input conditions because this approach is independent of the existence and nonexistence of singular points by the result of analyzing the fingerprint database which is used to the experiments.