Fingerprint Orientation Refinement through Iterative Smoothing

TL;DR

This paper introduces a gradient-based method with novel integral operators and a regularisation procedure to refine fingerprint orientation fields, especially from noisy images, demonstrating improved accuracy through numerical experiments.

Contribution

It presents a new regularisation algorithm with three integral operators and a pre-processing step for enhanced fingerprint orientation extraction from noisy data.

Findings

Effective noise reduction in fingerprint orientation fields

Improved accuracy demonstrated in numerical experiments

Novel integral operators enhance regularisation process

Abstract

We propose a new gradient-based method for the extraction of the orientation field associated to a fingerprint, and a regularisation procedure to improve the orientation field computed from noisy fingerprint images. The regularisation algorithm is based on three new integral operators, introduced and discussed in this paper. A pre-processing technique is also proposed to achieve better performances of the algorithm. The results of a numerical experiment are reported to give an evidence of the efficiency of the proposed algorithm.