With the advance of the modern information society, the importance of reliable identity authentication has increased dramatically. Using biometrics as a means for verifying the identity of a person increases both the security and the convenience of the systems. By using yourself to verify your identity such risks as lost keys and misplaced passwords are removed and by virtue of this, convenience is also increased. The most mature and well-developed biometric technique is fingerprint recognition. Fingerprints are unique for each individual and they do not change over time, which is very desirable in this application. There are multitudes of approaches to fingerprint recognition, most of which work by identifying so called minutiae and match fingerprints based on these. In this diploma work, two alternative methods for locating distinct features in fingerprint images have been evaluated. The Template Correlation Method is based on the correlation between the image and templates created to approximate the homogenous ridge/valley areas in the fingerprint. The high-dimension of the feature vectors from correlation is reduced through principal component analysis. By visualising the dimension reduced data by ordinary plotting and observing the result classification is performed by locating anomalies in feature space, where distinct features are located away from the non-distinct. The Circular Sampling Method works by sampling in concentric circles around selected points in the image and evaluating the frequency content of the resulting functions. Each images used here contains 30400 pixels which leads to sampling in many points that are of no interest. By selecting the sampling points this number can be reduced. Two approaches to sampling points selection has been evaluated. The first restricts sampling to occur only along valley bottoms of the image, whereas the second uses orientation histograms to select regions where there is no single dominant direction as sampling positions. For each sampling position an intensity function is achieved by circular sampling and a frequency spectrum of this function is achieved through the Fast Fourier Transform. Applying criteria to the relationships of the frequency components classifies each sampling location as either distinct or non-distinct. Using a cyclic approach to evaluate the methods and their potential makes selection at various stages possible. Only the Circular Sampling Method survived the first cycle, and therefore all tests from that point on are performed on thismethod alone. Two main errors arise from the tests, where the most prominent being the number of spurious points located by the method. The second, which is equally serious but not as common, is when the method misclassifies visually distinct...
