The use of fingerprints for identification has been employed in law enforcement for about a century. A much broader application of fingerprints is for personal authentication, for instance to access a computer, a network, a bank-machine, a ca

In the current decade, we are witnessing a great interest in Content Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) together with a wealth of promising technologies, paved for a large number of new mechanisms and systems. In terms of mechanisms, a strong trend towards