Robust crease detection in fingerprint images

We study a pattern in the fingerprint called a crease, a kind of stripe which irregularly crosses the normal fingerprint patterns (ridges and valleys). Creases will cause spurious minutiae when using a conventional feature detection algorithm, and therefore decreases the recognition rate of fingerprint identification. By representing the crease using a parameterized rectangle, we design an optimal filter as a detector. We employ a multi-channel filtering framework to detect creases in different orientations. In each channel, PCA is used to extract a rectangle´s parameters from the raw detected results. Our algorithm is demonstrated by experiments.