Title: Fingerprint quality assessment based on wave atoms transform

Authors: Leila Boutella; Amina Serir

Addresses: Faculty of Electronic and Computing, U.S.T.H.B, Laboratoire de Traitement d'images et Rayonnement, L.T.I.R, B.P. 32 El Alia Bab Ezzouar, Algiers 16111, Algeria ' Faculty of Electronic and Computing, U.S.T.H.B, Laboratoire de Traitement d'images et Rayonnement, L.T.I.R, B.P. 32 El Alia Bab Ezzouar, Algiers 16111, Algeria

Abstract: Fingerprint image quality is of great importance for an automatic fingerprint identification system (AFIS), and affects its performance. In this paper, a new fingerprint image quality measure based on wave atoms transform is proposed. Indeed, fingerprint features are extracted by exploiting wave atoms multi-scale and multi-directional properties. Hence, for good quality block, the singularities are concentrated in a same directional subbands. In the opposite, for poor quality, the singularities are scattered over several directional subbands. In order to evaluate the performance of the algorithm, FVC (2002) databases have been considered. The results show that this method has a serious potential in fingerprint quality evaluation and will improve the performance and effectiveness of AFIS.

Keywords: wave atoms transform; multidirectional analysis; fingerprint quality assessment; biometrics; fingerprints; image quality; fingerprint identification; feature extraction.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBM.2014.060979

International Journal of Biometrics, 2014 Vol.6 No.2, pp.143 - 165

Received: 06 Jul 2013
Accepted: 23 Jan 2014
Published online: 07 Jun 2014 *

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