Robust Fingerprint Enhancement by Directional Filtering in Fourier Domain

Abstract

Reliable extraction of true minutiae in fingerprint image is critical to the performance of an automated fingerprint identification system (AFIS). In order to utilize AFIS in law enforcement agencies first step is to digitalize an archive of fingerprints obtained by ink method. For improving the quality of automatically extracted minutiae (both in number and type) enhancement is previously performed, but, nevertheless, quite a number of spurious minutiae (especially in blurry or regions containing scars and creases) are extracted. It is crucial for AFIS performance that number of extracted (and consequently saved in fingerprint template) spurious minutia is minimized to maximal extent. In order to do so, we propose directional Log-Gabor filtering in frequency domain. Results proved to be preferable for a wide range of input digitized fingerprint images