A Novel Method for Touch-Less Finger Print Authentication Hareesh Ravi B.E Instrumentation and Control Engineering Sri Sai Ram Engineering College Chennai, India haree.24@gmail.com Sabarish Kuduwa Sivanath M.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering University of Rochester, Rochester New York, USA Sabarish.kuduwasivanath@rochester.edu Abstract— We propose a ‘Touch-less finger print system’, the hardware of which is limited to just a webcam and a processor. The present biometric systems are either costly or unhygienic, as a person who is perfectly healthy may acquire a disease from the system which was already used by a diseased person. For various reasons, users are concerned about touching the biometric scanners. Even then fingerprint remains to be the most unique feature of any person. Webcams are concomitant with today’s PCs and laptops making it easier to implement our system. Our proposal is basically a software that can be implemented anywhere with access to a PC and a webcam. We use a web camera to capture the user’s finger at a distance for recognition. The finger image so obtained is isolated from the background and ridges are extracted. The finger print is then processed in Euclidean space to obtain the minutiae points. Spurious minutiae are removed and the orientations and Euclidean distances of the minutiae points are saved for future matching. The main applications of this system widens to almost all fields especially Personal security (PC, Laptops and Mobile Phones), Defense, Attendance, ATM etc. Keywords- Retinex Algorithm, illumination normalization, Coherence Filter, Anisotropic diffusion, Minutiae Extraction, Orientation. I. INTRODUCTION A number of biometric systems are available at present and are increasingly being used for almost everything that needs security or identification and verification. These systems are mostly implemented in workplaces and government agencies because they are all mostly costly. While fingerprint takes more than 50% of market share, it is customary for anybody to hesitate when asked to place their finger on a scanner in a hospital (SANITARY ISSUES). Some people tend to hesitate even when infrared rays pass through their eyes for iris or retinal recognition (INVASIVE). It is difficult to implement such security measures for personal security domestically (COSTLY).What if there is a way to provide maximum security by using just a webcam and a PC or a laptop (LOW COST, EFFICIENT, NON INVASIVE AND NON CONTACT)? Personal security is not readily available with any of the present systems as it requires owning a separate hardware that consists of either a scanner or a transceiver or a high resolution imaging device etc. II. PROPOSED SYSTEM We proffer to implement a system (application software) that captures an image of the user’s finger placed at a distance from the webcam (no contact) and use that image to grant access. The block diagram of the system is as follows: Fig 1: Block diagram of the proposed system 978-1-4799-1535-4/13/$31.00 ©2013 IEEE 147