A Study and Review on Fingerprint Image Enhancement and Minutiae Extraction

Abstract

Fingerprint recognition is one of the most popular and successful methods used for person identification, which takes advantage of the fact that the fingerprint has some unique characteristics called minutiae; which are points where a curve track finishes, intersect with other track or branches off. However obtaining a good fingerprint image is not always easy. Fingerprint images are rarely of perfect quality. They may be degraded and corrupted due to variations in skin and impression conditions. Thus, image enhancement techniques are employed prior to minutiae extraction to obtain a more reliable estimation of minutiae locations. In this paper we are doing the study and analysing the performance of various fingerprint enhancement techniques.