A matching-improved reparation method for incomplete fingerprint

Repairing incomplete fingerprints continues to be an important challenge today, despite the advances made in fingerprint enhancement techniques. Owing to the incomplete fingerprint may not include sufficient information such as minutiae and ridges, so matching error usually increases as the number of detected such details decreases. This paper proposed a reparation method and then applied this to matching in order to improve the reparation effect. Specifically, the nearest minutiae and sampling points are used for estimation the unknown orientation field firstly. Secondly, disrupted ridges are reconnected and missing minutiae are recovered based on previous outcome and the observation of ridges distribution. Finally, repaired results are verified in matching hierarchically to choose the best one, and the matching result is generated at the same time. Our experiments show that the proposed approach can actually improve the quality of reparation and effectively reduce the error of matching.