A top-down fingerprint image enhancement method based on Fourier analysis

Abstract

We present a top-down fingerprint image enhancement method which is based on Fourier analysis. Our method takes advantage of two filtering methods in Fourier domain proposed previously and employs a top-down iteration filtering technique, which enables the enhancement procedure not to rely severely on an accurate estimation of ridge frequency and orientation and also enables us to make use of more than the local information in local fingerprint filtering. Consequently, our method is robust to handle low quality fingerprint images. Results of enhancement are presented for some representative fingerprint images. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2004.