Influence of Skin Diseases on Fingerprint Quality and Recognition

Fingerprintrecognition belongs to one of the most often used biometric technologiesworldwide. Some people whose fingers are affected by a skin disease cannot usethis technology which is discriminating for them, since they are not allowed touse their fingerprints for the authentication purposes. This chapter describesresearch of influence of skin diseases to fingerprint recognition and allsupporting and related work of this research. This research requirescooperation of specialists from different professional areas: medical doctors,dactyloscopic experts, IT programmers etc. After some basic introduction tofingerprint recognition several skin diseases which may have an influence onthe process of fingerprint recognition are introduced. These were selected fromthe medical literature in close co-operation with medical doctors. Variousdiseases which may influence the functionality of fingerprint based systems areintroduced in a complete summarization here, divided into three subcategories.This overview from a biometric point of view is followed by a simpleintroduction into the problematic of dactyloscopic sensors and the descriptionof diseased fingerprint capturing station creation. Last parts of this chapterdescribe the algorithm for fingerprint image enhancement and process of qualityestimation of new diseased fingerprint quality database.