Fingerprint Image Enhancement – A Survey

Abstract

Fingerprint image enhancement is one of the most important operation in (Automated fingerprint Identification system, AFIS), and affect directly on the accuracy of the results in all other steps in fingerprint system (like feature extracting, noise removal, alignment, and matching), so the selection of suitable and efficient method is very important to avoid faulty results and to make fingerprint systems more reliable. Fingerprint images are rarely of perfect quality; they may be degraded and corrupted due to variations in skin and impression conditions. The available enhancement algorithms are based on either the local orientation field filtering scheme in space domain or the Gabor filtering scheme in the frequency domain. The local orientation could not be correctly estimated for fingerprint images of poor quality, which greatly restricts the applicability of these filtering techniques. The Gabor filters could obtain the reliable orientation estimate even for corrupted images, but it is time consuming. It is unsuitable for an on-line fingerprint recognition system such as AFIS.