Fingerprint Image Enhancement Using STFT Analysis

Contrary to popular belief, despite decades of research in fingerprints, reliable fingerprint recognition is an open problem. Extracting features out of poor quality prints is the most challening problem faced in this area. This paper introduces a new approach for fingerprint enhancement based on Short Time Fourier Transform(STFT) Analysis. STFT is a well known technique to analyze non-stationary signals. We extend its application to 2D images. The algorithm simultaneously estimates all the intrinsic properties of the fingerprints such as the foreground region mask, local ridge orientation and local frequency orientation. Furthermore we propose a probabilistic approach of robustly estimating these parameters. We compare the proposed approach to other filtering approaches and show that our technique performs favorably. We also objectively measure the improvement in recognition rate due to our enhancement. We obtain a 17% improvement in the recognition rate on a set of 800 images f...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: ICAPR
• Authors: Sharat Chikkerur, Venu Govindaraju, Alexander N. Cartwright
• Keywords: ICAPR 2005, Recognition Rate, Reliable fingerprint Recognition, Unified Biometrics