Handbook of Fingerprint Recognition

Rating:
Summary: THE Book on Fingerprints; Highly Recommended Reading.
Review: Handbook of Fingerprint Recognition is an excellent book and will appeal to anyone interested in biometrics or fingerprint recognition from an amateur level to actually being involved in the development of automatic fingerprint recognition algorithms. This handbook is an essential reading as it covers both an exhaustive survey of the fingerprint research literature as well as the numerous insights and advice. The book organizes, classifies, and presents hundreds of existing approached in a systematic way. The authors have mathematically formalized many research problems in fingerprint recognition and have included plenty of examples with visual aids to explain the concepts in a simple way. This handbook is the first known book entirely dedicated to the topic of automatic fingerprint recognition.

The Handbook of Fingerprint Recognition is written by the foremost leading international researchers in the field of biometrics and fingerprint recognition. The book contains a total of nine chapters, namely 1) Introduction, 2) Fingerprint Sensing, 3) Fingerprint Analysis and Representation, 4) Fingerprint Matching, 5) Fingerprint Classification and Indexing, 6) Synthetic Fingerprint Generation, 7) Multimodal Biometrics Systems, 8) Fingerprint Individuality, and 9) Securing Fingerprint Systems. Three of the chapters (1, 2, and 9) require no prior background and appeals to a wider audience including system integrators and security managers, but the rest of the core chapters require some familiarity with image/signal processing methods. The breadth of this book is phenomenal. For example, Chapter 4 covers not only the popular minutiae-based fingerprint matching algorithms but also correlation-based and various ridge-feature based fingerprint matching algorithms.

A DVD that contains all the fingerprint databases used in Fingerprint Verification Competition in year 2000 and 2002 is included with the book and is a valuable resource in testing your fingerprint recognition algorithms, since data collection is such an expensive process. A demo version of a synthetic fingerprint generator software (described in Chapter 6) is also included. You can use this software to create your own fingerprint databases at no cost. The book also contains an exhaustive bibliography, which makes it a great reference book.

Handbook of Fingerprint Recognition is the most comprehensive single source of information on biometrics and fingerprint recognition. I would recommend this book to anyone who would like to gain a technical understanding of this area - from the curious to the experts.

Rating:
Summary: Truly Outstanding
Review: The applications of Biometrics technology range from federated identity management to digital rights management, time and attendance, background checking, and homeland security. None of the biometric characteristics has received more attention till date than fingerprints. Fingerprint recognition is the most cost effective and accurate biometrics, which is evident from its rapid deployment in the widest range of security applications.

This book contains a plethora of information on every aspect of fingerprint recognition technology - introduction to biometrics and fingerprints, fingerprint sensing devices, feature extraction, matching, classification, synthetic fingerprint generation, multimodal systems, secure design, fingerprint individuality - you name it. The DVD accompanying this book will save you a lot of money and trouble of collecting your own data to test your algorithms.

The authors of this book - Davide Maltoni, Dario Maio, Salil Prabhakar, and Anil K. Jain - are undoubtedly some of the most well known and respected experts in the world on the topic of fingerprint recognition. It is no surprise that such extraordinary researchers have produced such an exceptional masterpiece.

Whether you are an inventor, developer, practitioner, forensic specialist, or system manager in this field looking for an excellent reference or just a novice looking for basic information on biometrics and fingerprint recognition technology, you must read this outstanding book.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent state-of-the-art overview of methods
Review: This book first describes the different biometric systems that exist. It describes different methods of acquiring the fingerprints and the advantages and drawbacks from each method. Then it handles the different analysis methods for fingerprints in depth. The matching algorithms that are known with their evaluation is handled throughly with their indexing and classification methods. It discusses methods for fingerprint evaluation with the databases of NIST on DVD and the software sfinge for artificially making the fingerprints.

The part that is really new is the multimodal biometric system and performance measures of these systems. It also handles the individuality of fingerprints themselves and finally it gives an overview of methods for attacking fingerprints systems (denial of service, fake fingers, trojan horses, replay but also the electronic storage systems behind them). If you are in biometrics and also in forensic science, you certainly should consider reading this book.

Rating:
Summary: A "must" for all interested in Biometrics
Review: This book is a "must". Very useful for my research on Biometrics and Multibiometrics Systems. No wonder this book received the 2003 PSP Award (Computer Science) from the Association of American Publishers.

Rating:
Summary: Truly Outstanding
Review: This book is a "must". Very useful for my research on Biometrics and Multibiometrics Systems. No wonder this book received the 2003 PSP Award (Computer Science) from the Association of American Publishers.

Rating:
Summary: A "must" for all interested in Biometrics
Review: This book is a "must". Very useful for my research on Biometrics and Multibiometrics Systems. No wonder this book received the 2003 PSP Award (Computer Science) from the Association of American Publishers.

Rating:
Summary: A comprehensive reference
Review: This book will be very useful to researchers in the field, technical experts asked to assess the technology, and nontechnical people wanting to learn and make decisions about biometrics. The book begins with an introductory chapter that summarizes biometric features and system performance, as well as giving a history of fingerprint usage. The second chapter compares and contrasts a variety of fingerprint image acquisition approaches. The third chapter provides a description of a number of feature extraction techniques, with special emphasis on point features known as minutiae. Fingerprint matching is covered in the fourth chapter, with emphasis on minutiae matching and the well-known FingerCode technique. The fifth chapter addresses techniques to handle the scaling problem (matching one fingerprint against a database of 100 is hard; matching a print against a database of 100,000,000 prints is harder!), as well as performance and database management issues. The sixth chapter presents a clever technique to populate fingerprint databases for assessment; namely, the generation of synthetic fingerprints. The seventh chapter addresses fusion of multiple biometrics (e.g., fingerprint plus face) for improved performance. The eighth chapter is a rigorous treatment of fingerprint individuality and should be required reading for those in the justice system that either routinely question the reliability of fingerprints or routinely trust them to be unique. The final chapter of the book deals with the security of fingerprint systems and covers common and uncommon spoofs. A comprehensive bibliography caps off this book. Finally, a DVD-rom with several fingerprint databases and a trial version of the synthetic fingerprint generation software accompanies the book.

The authors of this text are highly respected and important contributors to the science of computerized analysis of fingerprints. This book is likely to be an instant classic in a field of growing importance.

Rating:
Summary: Well-written and useful!
Review: This book will take the fingerprint research community by storm! The Handbook of Fingerprint Recognition deals thoroughly with various aspects of an automatic fingerprint-based biometric system including image acquisition, feature extraction, fingerprint matching and fingerprint indexing. It also discusses the individuality of fingerprints and its implications in a biometric system. In a separate chapter the authors deal with issues related to securing a fingerprint system. There is also a chapter devoted to multimodal biometric systems in which various integration strategies as well as integration scenarios are presented.

The elaborate bibliography is a testimony to the authors' comprehensive treatment of the subject. The illustrations and tables sprinkled throughout the book aid in the better understanding of the concepts being discussed.

I would recommend this book for both researchers and practitioners alike. Happy reading!