Fingerprint image compression

Storage of fingerprint image databases needs allocation of huge secondary storage devices. To reduce the increasing demand on storage space, efficient data compression techniques are badly needed. In addition to that, the exchange of fingerprint images between governmental agencies could be done fast. The compression algorithm must also preserve the original information in the original image. This research work focuses on finding the best parameters at the very beginning stage of selecting the wavelet packet filter bank. The experiments performed on 38 different filter banks lead us to the conclusion that the Coif5 filter bank results in 60% saving in storage space compared to the currently used standard Bior7.9. Statistical significance of the compression results indicated that we are 95% confident that the average number of non-zero coefficients lies in the range 5.33±0.431 in the case of Coif5 and 8.53±1.2 in the case of the Bior7.9. Objective image quality measures such as the mean square error, the peak signal-to-noise ratio were used to measure the reconstructed image quality. These measures showed a relative improvement in image quality compared to that achieved by the current standard while achieving a higher compression rate