Handbook of Fingerprint Recognition

Citation

Andrew, A.M. (2004), "Handbook of Fingerprint Recognition", Kybernetes, Vol. 33 No. 5/6, pp. 1063-1064. https://doi.org/10.1108/03684920410534128

This is a comprehensive review of its topic, whose importance in crime investigation has been recognised for many years. There is now reason for interest from another viewpoint since fingerprint recognition is one of the biometric techniques coming into use for personal identification in many areas (welfare disbursement, entry to secure premises, automatic teller machines, driving licences, and so on). Various possibilities for such biometric methods are compared and those most commonly used are listed as fingerprints, face, iris, speech and hand geometry.

It is acknowledged that fingerprint recognition is a complex problem, and despite a great deal of attention to it over nearly 50 years in the forensic context it is by no means a fully‐solved problem, despite a popular misconception that it is. It is still a challenging and important recognition problem, especially where poor‐quality images must be processed.

The authors aim in writing this book is as follows.

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  Introduce the readers to automatic techniques for fingerprint recognition. Introductory material is provided on all components/modules of a fingerprint recognition system.

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  Provide an in‐depth survey of the state‐of‐the‐art in fingerprint recognition.

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  Present in detail recent advances in fingerprint recognition, including sensing, feature extraction, matching and classification techniques, synthetic fingerprint generation, multimodal biometric systems, fingerprint individuality, and design of secure fingerprint systems.

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  Serve as the first complete reference book on fingerprint recognition, including an exhaustive bibliography.

All of these aims are well met in the nine chapters and 40‐page bibliography. The intended audience includes researchers, practising engineers, and students who wish to understand and/or develop fingerprint‐based recognition systems. The book is suggested as a reference book for a graduate course on biometrics, and the thoroughness of its treatment of this topic should be stressed because it is not obvious from the title. The material is clearly presented, with only a light sprinkling of mathematics, but with a great deal of detail in the illustrations, graphs and tables. This will certainly be a standard reference work in its field.

The included DVD contains four fingerprint databases used in a 2002 Fingerprint Verification Competition, and another four that were used in a similar event in 2000. It also includes a demonstration version of software that can be used to generate synthetic fingerprint images. The DVD has to be used with a suitably‐equipped computer, and it is perhaps hardly necessary to mention (though I was not sure till I tried it) that nothing of its content can be viewed on a DVD player attached to a television set.