Shock coupled coherence enhancing diffusion for robust core-point detection in fingerprints

Enhancing the flow-like structures is important in forensic applications especially in fingerprint analysis. In most of the practical scenarios the poor quality of the off-line prints collected, adversely affect the verification process. Though there has been a plethora of methods proposed in literature for enhancing the degraded images, very few of them are suitable for enhancing the flow-like structures because they are ignorant of the coherence features present in images with dominant flow-like structures. In this paper we propose a method which enhances the fingerprint images with utmost consideration to the coherence features of the fingerprints. This method provides a shock at the inflection points while retaining the flow-like nature of the fingerprints. In other words, it enhances the coherence of features along with the edges. The experimental results shown endorses on the capability of the method to enhance the fingerprints which in turn will result in identification of the core-points in the fingerprints with a better accuracy. The core-point identification is a crucial step in fingerprint verification.