2011 UKSim 13th International Conference on Modelling and Simulation

MySQL Database for Storage of Fingerprint Data

Nani Fadzlina Naim, Ahmad Ihsan Mohd Yassin, Wan Mohd Ameerul Wan Zamri, Suzi Seroja Sarnin
Faculty of Electrical Engineeering
Universitit Teknologi MARA (UiTM)
Shah Alam, Selangor, Malaysia
[email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]

Abstract— This project presents MySQL database for storage the ridges, and the white pixels correspond to the valleys
of fingerprint data. The application of the database is for [4].
future process; fingerprint matching. In this project, Matlab
R2009 is the software used for fingerprint image enhancement
and minutia extraction. MySQL is a relational database
management system (RDBMS) that runs as a server providing
multi-user access to a number of databases. XAMPP Control
Panel V2.5 software is also used for free and open source cross-
platform web server package, consisting mainly of the Apache
HTTP Server, MySQL database, and interpreters for scripts
written in the PHP and Perl programming languages. It is
found that this project shows an efficient and practical data
storage of fingerprint. Figure 1. Example of a ridge ending and a bifurcation

II. LITERATURE REVIEW

Keyword-Fingerprint image enhancement; fingerprint minutia
extraction; MySQL database; fingerprint matching; XAMPP The human fingerprint has a long history as means of
Control Panel V2.5. identifying individuals, dating back to civilizations of Egypt
and China [1]. The scientific proof that fingerprints are
I. INTRODUCTION unique for individuals was established by Galton [5], and
extended by Henry to distinguish fingerprints based on
Fingerprints recognition are the oldest and most widely
characteristics, such as arch, tented arch, loop, double loop,
used [1]. Despite the widespread use of fingerprints, there is
pocked loop, whorls, and mixes [1].
little statistical theory on the uniqueness of fingerprint
A lot of methods that can be implemented for image
minutia. A critical step in studying the statistics of
enhancement using Matlab software such as Gabor Filter
fingerprint minutia is to reliably extract minutia from the
technique [6], using Spiral technique [7] and more.
fingerprint images [2]. However, fingerprint images are
Nowadays, the latest version of Matlab has Image
rarely of perfect quality. They may be degraded and
Processing Toolbox which make easier to the user. One of
corrupted due to variations in skin and impression
the most widely cited fingerprint enhancement techniques is
conditions. Thus, image enhancement techniques are
the method employed by Hong et al. [3], which is based on
employed prior to minutia extraction to obtain a more
the convolution of the image with Gabor filters tuned to the
reliable estimation of minutia locations.
local ridge orientation and ridge frequency. The main stages
A fingerprint is composed of many ridges and furrows.
of this algorithm include normalisation, ridge orientation
These ridges and furrows present good similarities in each
estimation, ridge frequency estimation and filtering. A
small local window, like parallelism and average width [4].
simple method has been done by WuZhili [4], with is his
However, fingerprints are not distinguished by their ridges
own algorithm method. In this project, WuZhili’s method
and furrows, but by minutia, which are some abnormal
has been chosen as main reference.
points on the ridges. Instead the set of minutia types are
Basically, fingerprints have two levels of structure,
restricted into only two types, ridge endings and
global and unique. The global levels characterize the general
bifurcations, as other types of minutiae can be expressed in
structure of the ridge patterns, and are commonly used to
terms of these two feature types. Ridge endings
partition fingerprint databases [5, 8].
(terminations) are the points where the ridge curve
• Delta - the point of spreading apart of two parallel
terminates, and bifurcations are where a ridge splits from a
ridges.
single path to two paths at a Y-junction. Figure biometric
identification 1 illustrates an example of a ridge ending and • Central point - approximately the centre of loop
a bifurcation. In this example, the black pixels correspond to fingerprint, located within or on innermost recurve.
Based on the flow of ridges and the occurrence of

978-0-7695-4376-5/11 $26.00 © 2011 IEEE 293

DOI 10.1109/UKSIM.2011.62
 special patterns, the fingerprint can be classified compatibility with the Matlab image processing toolbox, the
based on: thumbprints’ images were converted from RGB to Grayscale
o Arch - the pattern in which the ridges format by using Adobe Photoshop CS5 and also used for
enter on one side, rise in the middle, relocation the images into uniform size.
and flow out from the other side.
o Tented arch - like plain arch, except A. Fingerprint Image Processing
from that the ridges form an angle at
This part starts from image enhancement until ROI
the enter.
(Region of Interest) extraction. Fingerprint image
o Loop - the pattern in which at least one
enhancement is to make the image clearer for easy further
ridge recurves, touching a line drawn
operations. Since the fingerprint images acquired from
from the delta to the central point.
sensors or other medias are not assured with perfect quality,
o Double loop – the pattern in which 2
those enhancement methods, for increasing the contrast
distinct yet separate loop formations
between ridges and furrows and for connecting the false
having 2 separate and distinct shoulders
broken points of ridges due to insufficient amount of ink, are
and also 2 deltas.
very useful for keep a higher accuracy to fingerprint
o Pocked loop – the pattern in which one
recognition. Below is the flow of this process [4]:
recurving ridge, 2 deltas, an obstruction to
the line of flow and no recurving ridge
inside the pattern area is touched or cut. Histogram
o Whorl - the pattern that contains at least Equalization
two deltas and one recurving ridge such as
a spiral or a variation of a circle.
o Mixed – the pattern in which a few others Enhancement by
pattern was combined. Fourier Transform

After image processing and extraction process, all the

data will be stored in MySQL database. To store the Image Binarization
database, a virtual server is required. The virtual server is
used to deploy the database and website in a simulation
environment before developing the actual web server [10]. It
is implemented by using XAMPP Control Panel V2.5 Image Segmentation
software to create a virtual machine. The virtual machine is
an implementation of a computer (guest) inside another
physical computer (host). This software is then installed to ROI Extraction
convert it into a web server. The web server would be used
to host the web pages and the database, which can then be
• Histogram Equalization
accessed by any web browser locally or from any computer
network and also in offline mode. For the MySQL database, Histogram equalization is to expand the pixel value
the PHP application, phpMyAdmin are used to store all the distribution of an image so as to increase the
fingerprints database. perceptional information.
• Enhancement by Fourier Transform
III. METHODOLOGY Divide the image into small processing blocks (32
by 32 pixels) and perform the Fourier transform
This project was divided by 3 section of process: according to:

1. Fingerprint image processing (1)

2. Fingerprint minutia extraction

for u = 0, 1, 2, ..., 31 and v = 0, 1, 2, ..., 31.
3. Storage MySQL database
For this project, Matlab R2009a software is chosen as a In order to enhance a specific block by its
tool to process fingerprint image. First of all, 30 samples of dominant frequencies, we multiply the FFT of the
students’ thumbprints were collected and the thumbprints block by its magnitude a set of times. Where the
were chosen for standardization of data. Next, all that 30 magnitude of the original FFT = abs(F(u,v)) =
samples of students’ thumbprints were scanned by using |F(u,v)|.
Canon PIXMA MP198 and saved in image format (.tiff). For

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 Get the enhanced block according to After the fingerprint ridge thinning, marking minutia
points is relatively easy. But it is still not a trivial
(2) task as most literatures declared because at least one
where F-1(F(u,v)) is done by: special case evokes my caution during the minutia
marking stage. 2 point was recorded as data to save
(3) in database from this process, real end point and real
branch point.
C. Storage MySQL Database
for x = 0, 1, 2, ..., 31 and y = 0, 1, 2, ..., 31.
Before all 30 students’ thumbprints data is stored in
The k in formula (2) is an experimentally MySQL database, the data is saved into Microsoft Excel.
determined constant, which we choose k=0.45 to Then, XAMPP Control Panel V2.5 software is installed in
calculate. While having a higher "k" improves the the computer to make the computer as a server. The MySQL
database management tool is phpMyAdmin. Three tables are
appearance of the ridges, filling up small holes in
used for storage of MySQL database as shown in Figure 3.0.
ridges, having too high a "k" can result in false
The tables are consist of the person identification (id)
joining of ridges. Thus a termination might become number, real end points data and real branch points data.
a bifurcation. After all the 30 students’ thumbprints’ data are stored in
• Image Binarization MySQL database by using PhpMyAdmin tool, it will be
Fingerprint Image Binarization is to transform the easier for future processing such as fingerprint matching.
8-bit Gray fingerprint image to a 1-bit image with IV. RESULT AND DISCUSSION
0-value for ridges and 1-value for furrows. After
the operation, ridges in the fingerprint are Figure 2.0 shows the original thumbprint’s image that
highlighted with black color while furrows are hass been converted into grayscale format by using Adobe
white. Photoshop CS5. Then, the image is loaded into Matlab
R2009a as shown in Figure 2.1. Histogram equalization
• Image Segmentation method is used to increase the global contrast as shown in
Figure 2.2.
In general, only a Region of Interest (ROI) is
useful to be recognized for each fingerprint image.
The image area without effective ridges and
furrows is first discarded since it only holds
background information. Then the bound of the
remaining effective area is sketched out since the
minutia in the bound region are confusing with
those spurious minutia that are generated when the
ridges are out of the sensor.

• ROI Extraction
Figure 2.0 Original thumbprint’s image in grayscale format
Two Morphological operations called ‘OPEN’ and
‘CLOSE’ are adopted. The ‘OPEN’ operation can
expand images and remove peaks introduced by
background noise. The ‘CLOSE’ operation can
shrink images and eliminate small cavities.

B. Fingerprint Minutia Extraction

This process is divided into two parts, firstly is ridge
thinning and the second one is minutia marking.
• Fingerprint Ridge Thinning
Ridge Thinning is to eliminate the redundant pixels
of ridges till the ridges are just one pixel wide [11] Figure 2.1 Thumbprint image after loading into Matlab R2009a
uses an iterative, parallel thinning algorithm.
• Minutia Marking

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 Figure 2.2 Thumbprint image after histogram equalization
Figure 2.6 Thumbprint image after ridge thinning
For this project, Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) factor for
each student’s thumbprint image is 0.5.

Figure 2.7: Thumbprint image after minutia extraction process

From minutia extraction process, two points are detected.

The first one is the real end (terminations) point which
Figure 2.3 Thumbprint image after enhancement by 0.5 of Fast Fourier
Transform (FFT) factor
denotes with red stars and the second one is real branch
(bifurcations) point which located with yellow crosses. The
genuine minutias are labeled with orientation with green
arrows.
Before inserting data into phpMyAdmin tool, all the real
end points and the real branch points’ data is saved into
Microsoft Excel. Then the data is converted into MySQL
language format. Table I and Table II show the real values of
end points’ data and branch points’data.
TABLE I. Example of real end points data

Figure 2.4 The direction of thumbprint’s ridge Point 1 Point 2 Point 3

138 24 2.5454
112 56 2.6779
76 82 -2.9997
109 52 -0.311
109 65 -0.3743
131 106 3.1416
127 162 -2.4756
299 107 3.1416
176 35 2.0626
Figure 2.5 Thumbprint image after binarization, segmentation and Region
of Interest (ROI) extraction process 186 40 -1.079
47 97 -2.8966
290 102 -2.8306
137 78 2.6224

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 191 62 -1.1965 48 129
222 68 -1.9757 142 33
110 84
195 78 -2.4062
120 99
226 83 -2.191
144 175
242 74 0.6202 276 49
261 103 0.245 142 79
187 77 -1.2598 211 170
222 86 0.8622 167 91
233 86 0.7854 174 92
193 99
146 98 2.7367
233 123
163 95 -0.4049
230 133
143 98 0 217 118
142 108 2.8966
174 100 -0.4049
Three tables are used to store all the data as shown
154 110 2.9997 in Figure 3.0. Figure 3.1 shows the table of the person’s
218 148 2.0055 identification number (id). Figure 3.2 shows several real end
points’ data for person’s id number 1. Several different data
132 110 0.0357 are obtained for one person since several thumbprints’
144 112 0.0713 images are collected for one person. Figure 3.3 shows
several real branch points’ data for two persons with id
216 136 2.6779
number 1 and 2.
224 157 1.9451
265 174 2.7673
159 131 0.8831
152 139 0.8622
189 175 -1.9757
196 147 -1.8491
34 169 -2.5703
85 86 -2.7234
87 86 2.7234
86 88 0.0278
143 32 2.4038
141 34 -0.7346
143 34 1.4601
Figure 3.0 Three tables of MySQL database in phpMyAdmin tool;
fingerprints’ branch points data, fingerprints’ end points data and persons’
TABLE II. Example of real branch points data identification number

Point 1 Point 2
131 27
108 33
17 55
45 61
31 78
86 87
17 103

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 used. The data can also be accessed by others since MySQL
is a relational database management system that provides
multi-user access.

V. CONCLUSION
As a conclusion, the objective of this project has been
achieved which is to enhance thumbprints’ images, extract
the thumbprint minutia and store the data into MySQL
database. This application is useful especially for biometric
identification, applications such as biometric attendance and
others.
For future recommendation and development, face image
or retina image for biometric identification can be done and
the data can be stored in MySQL database.

REFERENCES
Figure 3.1 Table of the person’s identification number and name in
phpMyAdmin tool [1] P.A. Hughes and A.D.P. Green, "The Use of Neural Network for
Thumbprint Classification," Proc. 2nd Int. Conf. Neural Network, pp.
79-81, 1991.
[2] Raymond Thai, Thumbprint Image Enhancement and Minutiae
Extraction, The University of Western Australia 2003.
[3] Hong, L., Wan, Y., and Jain, A. K. Thumbprint image
enhancement: Algorithm and performance evaluation. IEEE
Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence 20, 8
(1998), 777–789.
[4] WuZhili. Thumbprint Recognition, Hong Kong Baptist University,
2002.
[5] Galton, F. Thumbprints. Mcmillan, 1982.
[6] Lee, C.J., and Wang, S.D.: Thumbprint feature extration using Gabor
filters, Electron. Lett., 1999, 35, (4), pp.288-290.
[7] Woon Ho Jung, Fast Thumbprint Recognition Using Spiral, Carnegie
Mellon University.
[8] Lee, C.J., and Wang, S.D.: Thumbprint feature extraction using Gabor
filters, Electron. Lett., 1999, 35, (4), pp.288-290.
[9] Alessandro Farina, Zsolt M.Kovacs-Vajna, Alberto leone,
Thumbprint minutiae extraction from skeletonized binary images,
Pattern Recognition, Vol.32, No.4, pp877-889, 1999.
Figure 3.2 Table of real end points’ data that relate with their person id [10] H. Z. Abidin, F. Y. Abdul Rahman, I. M. Yassin, E. E. Mohd Sayuti,
Development of a Local Web Server Linked to Malaysian Research
and Education Network (MyREN), 2009.
[11] L.C. Jain, U.Halici, I. Hayashi, S.B. Lee and S.Tsutsui. Intelligent
biometric techniques in thumbprint and face recognition. 1999, the
CRC Press.
[12] Amengual, J. C., Juan, A., Prez, J. C., Prat, F., S., And Vilar, J. M.
Real Time Minutea Extraction In Thumbprint Images in Proc. Of The
6th International Conferences On Image Processing And Its
Application (July 1997), PP. 871-875.

Figure 3.3 Table of real branch points’ data that relate with their person id

After all the data is stored into MySQL database, it is

easier for future process such as fingerprint matching. The
data that has been stored can also be added or deleted easily
by user since a friendly Graphic User Interface (GUI) is

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