Optimization Based Fingerprint Direction Field Estimation

Fingerprint direction field estimation is a key step among most of fingerprint enhancement systems, and so far, in most of systems it heavily relies on local ridge gradient information. However, this method is sensitive to noises and often results in poor estimation in regions where there are too much noises. In this paper, we introduce an effective algorithm to estimate the fingerprint direction field accurately. By using the global ridge characters, the fingerprint direction field is optimized from squared gradients. Experimental results indicate that our algorithm can improve the accuracy of the ridge direction estimation and reduce the influence of noises effectively