Study on Fingerprint Images Using Delaunay Patterns to Identify Hereditary Relations Among Family Members of Three Generations

In this work, an effort is taken to identify hereditary relation among intraclass family members using fingerprint minutiae features. These minutiae features include endings and bifurcations. The fingerprint images are collected from 324 subjects of 54 different families, of three generations, comprising three members in each family. As the quality of the fingerprint images needs to be improved for minutiae feature extraction from thinned ridge image, a series of preprocessing and postprocessing steps are sequentially applied. Using structural elements, thinned ridge pattern was obtained from the preprocessed image. Then, morphological operations are performed over the thinned ridge pattern to remove spurious elements such as spurs, bridges, breaks, and dots. After removing the spurious elements, valid minutiae points (endings and bifurcations) are obtained using morphological operators. The minutiae points are analyzed to study the hereditary relation with the help of Delaunay patterns which is formed with the help of the coordinate points of the minutiae features. The result shows that the intrafamily members are having the similar type of Delaunay patterns and it proves the presence of hereditary relation among intrafamily members.