1-D Gabor Directional Filtering for Low-Quality Fingerprint Image Enhancement

Automatic fingerprint identification is widely considered as the most reliable biometric person identification technique. The fingerprint recognition performance depends on the quality of fingerprint images. In this paper, we propose a method which applies a 1-D Gabor filter for ridge orientation estimation and image enhancement as well. The proposed method produces higher efficiency and better ridge smoothness than the conventional 2-D Gabor filtering. This approach contributes to the improvement of the accuracy of fingerprint minutiae extraction and the performance of minutiae matching