The performance of a fingerprint matching system is affected by the nonlinear deformation
introduced in the fingerprint impression during image acquisition. Many matching
algorithms have been proposed to deal with the nonlinear distortions of the fingerprint
images. Recently, these distortion issues can be solved by using incorporating ridge feature
with minutiae. In this paper, we proposed a novel ridge feature extraction algorithm to
improve the accuracy of fingerprint matching and the time of ridge feature extraction
process. The experimental results show that our proposed algorithm archives 1.8 times
faster than Choi’s algorithm on FVC2004-DB1A, FVC2004-DB3A databases. And the equal
error rate (ERR) of the ROC for Choi’s one is 6.35% and it is only 5.23% for the proposed
algorithm on FVC2004-DB3A database. This proved that the proposed algorithm is a reliable
and effective algorithm for distorted fingerprints matching.