Fusion of multiple candidate orientations in fingerprints

This paper addresses the problem of local ridge orientation estimation of fingerprint image. The proposed method computes multiple candidate orientations for each foreground block. A systematic method, consisting of orientation voting and orientation propagation, for selecting orientation out of the multiple candidates is designed according to the smooth changing of local ridge orientations. Experiments show that the proposed methods are robust for poor quality images and the overall matching performance is improved. ? 2011 Springer-Verlag.EI