An Iterative Fingerprint Enhancement Algorithm Based on Accurate Determination of Orientation Flow

TL;DR

This paper presents an iterative fingerprint enhancement algorithm that accurately determines ridge orientation flow to improve the quality of poor fingerprint images through enhancement and binarization.

Contribution

It introduces a novel iterative method that jointly optimizes orientation flow computation, enhancement, and binarization for better fingerprint image quality.

Findings

Effective on poor quality fingerprint images

Improves ridge clarity and binarization accuracy

Shows superior results compared to existing methods

Abstract

We describe an algorithm to enhance and binarize a fingerprint image. The algorithm is based on accurate determination of orientation flow of the ridges of the fingerprint image by computing variance of the neighborhood pixels around a pixel in different directions. We show that an iterative algorithm which captures the mutual interdependence of orientation flow computation, enhancement and binarization gives very good results on poor quality images.