DefinePK

Abstract

This paper describes on how we can use the fingerprint ridge density to classify the gender in people living in northern part of Malaysia. Ridge density is the number of digital ridges per unit area and it is claimed varies according to sex, age, and population origin. The main objective of this study is to test the truth of the relationship between the fingerprint ridge densities and the gender of a person born and lives in Malaysia as until now, no work on such study has been reported among the population. The sample of this study consists of 50 participants coming from the age group of 18-60 year old and consists of 25 males and 25 females. All the respondents had been properly explained about the objectives of the intended study and the consent had been taken before their fingerprints collected. The fingerprint images that taken manually will be going through the image pre-processing phase using a MATLAB software before the ridge of the fingerprint from two topological areas, radial and lunar can be counted and the mean can be calculated. The results show that fingerprint ridges of less than 12 ridges/25mm² is more likely belong to a male respondent while fingerprint ridges of more than 14 ridges/25mm² is more likely to be from a female respondent. From the result, we can conclude that in Malaysia too, woman tends to have a greater ridges density compared to man. It shows similar trends in sex difference as the other studies of the past conducted on other races in other countries and we can conclude that the trend is universal among all races in the world. From this conclusion, we know that the ridges density is highly trusted to be one of the best criteria for feature extraction in gender classification and this will inspire further research of other classification of feature extraction in gender determination by using a fingerprint.