The enormous interest aroused by electronic commerce on the Internet and, more generally, by the need for reliable techniques to authenticate the identity of a living person in a broad range of applications has greatly intensified development of biometric systems. These systems are automated methods of verifying or recognizing a living person's identity on the basis of some physiological characteristics, like a fingerprint or iris pattern, or some aspects of behavior, like handwriting or keystroke patterns. Thanks to their proven individuality and stability over time, fingerprint identification systems have been in use longer than any other biometric identifiction technique. The book is the first reference on automatic fingerprint recognition and provides an in-depth survey of the fingerprint state-of-the-art, presenting the most recent advances in fingerprints: sensing, feature extraction and matching, synthetic generation, indexing, and multi- modal systems. This handbook is ideally suited to researchers and students in biometrics, pattern recognition, forensics, image processing, and computer vision. In addition, it will be essential to developers of biometric solutions, biometric systems users who want a better understanding of their mechanisms, as well as to project managers and system integrators and administators involved in the analysis, design, and management of fingerprint-based biometric systems. This unique reference work is an absolutely essential resource for all biometric security professionals, researchers, and systems administrators.