One aspect of modeling a fingerprint is modeling the minutiae. Oddly enough, although
fingerprint-based authentication and identification has been around for quite
some time, a precise definition of minutiae has never been formulated. Often only a loose description of minutiae is given. Since we began this work, we have contributed
to the AAMVA standard [7] which does adopt a minutia definition (paragraphs
C.10.3.2,3) but this specifies points on the medial skeleton, itself subject to variations
of implementation and presupposing a binary image which is also not well-defined.