  Naturally, with the mounting application of biometric systems, there arises a
difficulty in storing and handling those acquired biometric data. Fingerprint
recognition has been recognized as one of the most mature and established
technique among all the biometrics systems. In recent times, with fingerprint
recognition receiving increasingly more attention the amount of fingerprints
collected has been constantly creating enormous problems in storage and
transmission. Henceforth, the compression of fingerprints has emerged as an
indispensable step in automated fingerprint recognition systems. Several
researchers have presented approaches for fingerprint image compression. In
this paper, we propose a novel and efficient scheme for fingerprint image
compression. The presented scheme utilizes the Bezier curve representations for
effective compression of fingerprint images. Initially, the ridges present in
the fingerprint image are extracted along with their coordinate values using
the approach presented. Subsequently, the control points are determined for all
the ridges by visualizing each ridge as a Bezier curve. The control points of
all the ridges determined are stored and are used to represent the fingerprint
image. When needed, the fingerprint image is reconstructed from the stored
control points using Bezier curves. The quality of the reconstructed
fingerprint is determined by a formal evaluation. The proposed scheme achieves
considerable memory reduction in storing the fingerprint.
