Improving minutiae detection in fingerprints using multiresolution contrast enhancement

Abstract

The majority of automatic fingerprint matching systems depends on the comparison of the local ridge characteristics (bifurcation and termination), and a critical step in fingerprint matching is to extract minutiae from the input image. In this work we propose a novel ridge following algorithm based on a robust image enhancement filtering. Several experiments are carried out, showing the performances of the proposed approach. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.