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Biometric identification still remains one of the most reliable and consistent
methodologies for identification as established over the years from various studies among other
authentication systems. Fingerprint biometrics is the most commonly and universally accepted
biometric due to its uniqueness among all other biometrics. Minutiae algorithm remains the
widely and popularly used method but still needs improvement for better performance due to its
poor performance in real-time validation. The problems of minutiae method can be eliminated and
its performance enhanced by combining correlation approach. This paper used a hybrid fingerprint
matching system with the fusion of minutiae and correlation features. The final matching score is
calculated by fusing matching scores of the two algorithms. The False Acceptance Rate (FAR),
False Recognition Rate (FRR), and the Mean Evaluation Metrics (MEM) were used for performance
evaluation of the proposed system. The hybridized system achieves better results when compared
with other related works on commonly used databases Fingerprint Verification Competition (FVC)
2002. The authors obtained FAR = 0.0038, FRR = 0.0156 and an accuracy = 99.25%. The evaluation
results show an effective performance over the use of only minutiae algorithm for identification
and authentication. Moreso, the results show the improvement in performance of the proposed
method and the added advantages of combining both algorithms for identifications systems and
performed better in real time identification and verification of large databases.
Keywords: Hybrid system, correlation technique, fingerprint identification, Minutiae algorithm,
biometric.