New Fingerprint Image Enhancement Using Directional Filter Bank

Abstract

This paper describes a new method of directional filter-based analysis for fingerprint enhancement. Fingerprint images can be represented by a directional field of regular structure of ridge patterns. The dominant directional component of ridge plays a very important role in the pre-processing steps of fingerprint image analysis such as ridge's linking and noise removal for minutiae extraction. A directional filter bank analyzes an input image into directional subband images and synthesizes them to the perfectly reconstructed image. In this paper, a new fingerprint enhancement algorithm based on a directional filter bank is proposed. The algorithm decomposes a fingerprint image into directional subband images in the analysis stage, processes the subband images in the processing stage, and reconstructs them as the enhanced image in the synthesis stage. The experiment results show that the proposed method reduces the influence of noise on the ridges and valleys, enhances the ridge’s moving shape, and preserves the spatial characteristics at minutiae and singular points.