Fingerprint Image Enhancement Based on Second Directional Derivative of the Digital Image

This paper presents a novel approach of fingerprint image enhancement that relies on detecting the fingerprint ridges as image regions where the second directional derivative of the digital image is positive. A facet model is used in order to approximate the derivatives at each image pixel based on the intensity values of pixels located in a certain neighborhood. We note that the size of this neighborhood has a critical role in achieving accurate enhancement results. Using neighborhoods of various sizes, the proposed algorithm determines several candidate binary representations of the input fingerprint pattern. Subsequently, an output binary ridge-map image is created by selecting image zones, from the available binary image candidates, according to a MAP selection rule. Two public domain collections of fingerprint images are used in order to objectively assess the performance of the proposed fingerprint image enhancement approach.