Image enhancement algorithm for ink-on-paper fingerprints

Abstract

Quality of a scanned ink-on-paper fingerprint (or offline fingerprint) is generally poorer than that of online fingerprint and therefore, it requires an efficient enhancement method. This paper presents an algorithm to enhance the offline fingerprints using adaptive techniques. The algorithm handles certain problems that are specific to this type of fingerprints. It involves fingerprint extraction, intra-image classification followed by adaptive region enhancement of classified regions. It has been tested on IIT Kanpur database. The results show that the proposed algorithm performs well in enhancing ink-on-paper fingerprints. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.