Latent Fingerprint preprocessing: Orientation field correction using region wise dictionary

Latent Fingerprint Images have been extensively used by law enforcement agencies in investigating the crime spot and use the necessary information obtained as evidence to validate the criminal in Court. Although an important breakthrough in this direction has already been made in plain biometrics recognition, still identifying biometric such as Face in CCTV footage and Latent Fingerprint in uncontrolled, uncooperative, and hostile environment is an open research problem. Poor quality, lack of clarity, absence of proper mechanism make the latent fingerprint preprocessing problem one of the persistent and challenging problem to extract the reliable features. Dictionary based learning technique has given significant result, in contrast to conventional orientation field estimation methods by reconstructing orientation field to enhance the latent fingerprint image. Distorted orientation field is corrected using orientation patches of good quality fingerprint from region wise dictionary. This paper proposes a fresh idea to construct the dictionary by region wise to correct the orientation field in latent image. To verify the accuracy of enhanced image, a statistical observation has been done and got the promising results. This study concentrates on latent fingerprint preprocessing module towards reliable and efficient (optimal) Latent Fingerprint Identification.