Fingerprint classification approaches: an overview

Fingerprint classification was introduced to reduce the searching time of fingerprint recognition. There have been many new approaches introduced, mostly in the design of feature extraction. However, no literature to date explicitly documents all fingerprint classification approaches. On the other hand, this paper studies some of the current approaches by grouping them into two groups-classifier, and feature extractor. A lot of emphasis put into the design of the fingerprint feature extractor shows that it deserves to be separated from the classifier. While it cannot be said that the development of the classifier has remained stagnant, there has been a lack of novel designs of the classifier, and a lot of research into neural network based classifiers.