A Fast Fingerprint Image Enhancement Method

The quality of fingerprint image can heavily affect the performance of fingerprint recognition system, for features essentially needed may not be well extracted due to noises. So it is important to incorporate a fingerprint image enhancement algorithm before feature extraction stage. This paper proposes an effective fingerprint image enhancement method. First the orientation image is obtained in a convenient way. Then Gabor filter is utilized for fingerprint image enhancement. We devise amore reasonable filtering region on the basis of the orientation and frequency of local ridges for filtering. Finally a fast implementation of Gabor filter is adopted. Images of varying quality have been used to evaluate the performance of our approach and the results show that the proposed method has excellent capability both in filtering effectiveness and efficiency.