Title: Fingerprint enhancement and compression method using Morlet wavelet

Authors: P. Viswanathan, P. Venkata Krishna

Addresses: School of Information Technology and Engineering, VIT University, Vellore 632014, India. ' School of Computing Science and Engineering, VIT University, Vellore 632014, India

Abstract: Fingerprint image being a non-stationary image, the normal filtering approach and transformation like FFT will not provide efficient enhancement. This problem is studied using our new algorithm based on Morlet wavelet. This algorithm consists of two stages. In the first stage, wavelet analysis is used, which estimates contextual information like frequency and orientation of the image. The second stage uses Gabor filtering for smoothening and removing the noise. Good ridge continuity is obtained with compression and Gabor filtering removes the spurious minutiae. The experimental results obtained by this new algorithm provided accurate recognition and less storage compared with the existing approaches.

Keywords: fingerprint enhancement; fingerprint compression; wavelet analysis; Gabor filtering; fingerprint images; image recognition; ridge continuity.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSISE.2010.038022

International Journal of Signal and Imaging Systems Engineering, 2010 Vol.3 No.4, pp.261 - 268

Received: 06 Aug 2010
Accepted: 20 Sep 2010
Published online: 10 Jan 2011 *

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