A novel approach to fingerprint ridge line extraction

Extraction of fingerprint ridge lines is a critical pre-processing step in the identification of poor quality fingerprint images. This paper presents a new fingerprint ridge line extraction approach by way of ridge line tracing. In our research, the fingerprint ridge line in a gray scale image is viewed as a track of a ridge segment moving along the ridge. The curve tracing problem is solved by the target tracking technique in computer vision. We first formulate the model of fingerprint ridge line segments and then apply a target tracking method to trace each of the ridge lines. In addition, a feedback technique is adopted to correct the fingerprint directional image in each tracing step in order to improve tracing accuracy. By connecting all the traced ridge line segments, a polyline extraction of the ridge line can be obtained. Compared to conventional method, our approach exhibits superior performance.