An effective and robust fingerprint enhancement by adaptive filtering in frequency domain

Extensive research of automatic fingerprint identification system (AFIS), although started in the early 1960s, has not yet give the answer to reliable fingerprint recognition problem. A critical step for AFIS accuracy is reliable extraction of features (mostly minutiae) from the input fingerprint image. However, the effectiveness of a feature extraction relies heavily on the quality of the input fingerprint images. This leads to the incorporation of a fingerprint enhancement module in fingerprint recognition system to make the system robust with respect to the quality of input fingerprint images. In this paper we propose an adaptive filtering in frequency domain in order to enhance fingerprint image. Two different directional filters are proposed and results are compared