Reconnection of fingerprint ridges based on morphological operators and multiscale directional information

In this paper we introduce a multiscale operator which, together with some morphological tools, can be used to reconnect broken components of an image. This operator extracts the orientation field from the image components and can be applied to both binary and gray-scale pictures. Although we illustrate its application in the fingerprint domain, the approach described here can be easily extended to images whose components exhibit well-defined directional information.