in this paper we focus on continuous clasification of fingerprints.

in that case, each

fingerprint can be characterized as a feature vector within the multi-dimensional space.
by assuming that similar fingerprints are mapped into close points, the retrieval
problem can be solved as nearest-neighbor search. In such case, we are able to sidestep
the problem of exclusive membership of ‘ambigous’ fingerprints and to control the
reliability of the system by adjusting the size of the neighborhoods.