Fingerprint image enhancement using Principal Component Analysis (PCA) filters

A new method based upon Principal Component Analysis (PCA) for fingerprint enhancement is proposed in this paper. PCA is a useful statistical technique that has found application in fields such as face recognition and image compression, and is a common technique for finding patterns in data of high dimension. In the proposed method image is first decomposed into directional images using decimation free Directional Filter bank DDFB. Then PCA is applied to these directional fingerprint image which gives the PCA filtered images. Which are basically directional images. Then these directional images are reconstructed into one image which is the enhanced one. Simulation results are included illustrating the capability of the proposed method.