In order to integrate fingerprint recognition you need a fingerprint scanner and a fingerprint SDK (if you are a developer) or a fingerprint recognition Software (if you are the end user).

A fingerprint scanner is a USB device whose sole job is to capture a fingerprint image and pass it on to the computer. That’s all a fingerprint scanner does.

Stages of fingerprint recognition software

Fingerprint Registration

This is the most important stage of any application. In this stage a fingerprint is captured and stored in the database. It is really important to ensure that the fingerprint captured is of very good. The reason being that all future matches will happen against this stored fingerprint. If this is of not that great quality then you will not get good results.

A user puts his finger on the fingerprint scanner. The fingerprint scanner captures the fingerprint image and passes it on to the computer. There is a fingerprint recognition software waiting on the computer expecting a fingerprint image. Once it gets the fingerprint image, you can use the fingerprint algorithm (or fingerprint SDK) to convert this image into a template. Fingerprint image on its own cannot be used for matching. You need a fingerprint template to do any kind of fingerprint operation. Once you have the template, the next step is to do a Quality check. You can use a fingerprint quality check algorithm to do a quality check. If the quality score is good enough then the next step is to store the template in the database along with other attributes of the user records. I cannot stress enough how important a good quality score is at this stage. Once you have a good fingerprint template, you can store it in the database.

Fingerprint Matching

Weather you are using fingerprint matching for attendance or access control or for logging onto an application etc. the matching process is similar for most applications.

Let’s say you are using fingerprints for attendance. In the morning when a user comes to office, he puts his fingerprint on the scanner. What does the scanner do? You guessed it right. The fingerprint scanner captures the finger image and passess it onto the fingerprint recognition software. As mentioned earlier, you need to convert the fingerprint image into a template to do any further processing. You will use the fingerprint SDK function and convert the image into a template. Once you have a template, the fingerprint recognition software can match it against the existing templates in the database. In order to match 2 templates, you can use the matching function of the fingerprint algorithm (or fingerprint SDK). This function takes 2 fingerprint templates as input and tells you if they match. If they match then the fingerprint recognition software can retrieve the user record and do what needs to be done next. If they do not match fingerprint recognition software will carry on this process till it finds a match or till there are no more records left in the database.