Patent ID: 7027626

Claim:
A fingerprint/palmprint image processing system comprising a means for reading a fingerprint/palmprint image, an extracting means for dividing the fingerprint/palmprint image into a plurality of local regions and for extracting a plurality of ridge line candidate images which represents ridge lines, for each of the local regions, a highly reliable region determining means for determining, from the ridge line candidate images thus extracted, a ridge line candidate image having a high likelihood of ridge line, and a local region including the ridge line candidate image having the high likelihood of ridge line, as a highly reliable region, a selecting means for selecting a ridge line image which can be estimated to represent a ridge line, from the ridge line candidate images extracted by said extracting means, for each of the local regions other than the highly reliable region, a discriminating means for discriminating, for each ridge line image thus selected, whether or not the ridge line image thus selected is valid as an image representing a ridge line, and means for generating a whole image on the basis of the ridge line image in the highly reliable region and the ridge line image which were discriminated by said discriminating means to be valid as the image representing the ridge line wherein said discriminating means discriminates that the local region of the ridge line candidate image is valid if it has at least some degree of continuity to the local region determined as the highly reliable reason or otherwise is not valid, and said selecting means does not select the ridge line candidate image in the local region that was discriminated by said discriminating means as being not valid, said selecting means further selects one or more other regions being valid so that said discriminating means discriminates whether or not the ridge line image thus selected is valid and thereafter said selects means selects the a ridge line image in the local region that was discriminated by said discriminating means as being valid.