APPROACH TO UNWRAP A 3D FINGERPRINT TO A 2D EQUIVALENT FINGERPRINT

Fingerprints are the most widely used biometric feature for human identification because of their accuracy and uniqueness. Traditional fingerprint acquisition techniques are contact based and result in poor quality images. The new generation of non-contact based scanners capture high resolution and detailed 3D fingerprint scans, which addresses many of the problems of traditional fingerprint acquisition techniques. The majority of existing fingerprint databases available today are 2D, so there is a need for backward compatibility for the 3D scans captured. In order to solve this interoperability issue, I present an algorithm to unwrap the 3D fingerprint to its 2D equivalent image to be used in an Automatic Fingerprint Identification System