A method and a system for extracting a minutia mapping from a digital image, including dividing the image into regions; defining an orientation of each region based on the general direction of grooves in this region; and for each region: unidirectionally filtering the image portion along a direction perpendicular to the orientation of the region; locating the enters of gravity of the grooves based on the intensity of the filtering results, chaining up the barycenters along the general direction of the region grooves, and interpreting the results of the chaining to determine the presence of minutiae of end type or of branch type.