Fingerprint matching is one of the most important problems in Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS). In this paper a new method of the reference point alignment has been presented. A new approach of reference point localization is based on so-called identification masks which have been composed on the basis of analysis of biometric characteristic of human finger. Construction of such masks has been presented.
Experiments show that our approach locates a unique reference point with high accuracy for all types of fingerprints. Generally, fingerprint matching consists with three steps: core (reference) point detection, filter the image using a bank Gabor filters, and comparison with imprint pattern. It seems, that today, the Gabor filtering gives the best results in fingerprint recognition. The proposed method was evaluated and tested on various fingerprint images, included in the FVC2000 fingerprint database. Performed results with representative investigations have been compared.