minutiae (finger print)
Minutiae are endings and branches of the papillary lines of a fingerprint.
These characteristic points of the skin grooves are unique for each person and finger and cannot be changed. Therefore, they are used for authentication by means of fingerprint recognition. The extraction of the minutiae is performed by special algorithms from the fingerprint image provided by the fingerprint scanner. This includes the precise location of the minutiae, which is recorded as well as the number of minutiae for each finger.
For the authentication of persons, a predefined number of minutiae is compared with the existing reference data.