A Novel Fingerprint Enhancement Method Based on Gabor Filtering

Fingerprint image enhancement is very important in AFIS (Automatic Fingerprint Identification System). In this paper, a fingerprint enhancement method based on Gabor filtering is introduced. Compared with traditional Gabor-based method, the algorithm uses the improved Gabor filtering to improve the clarity of ridge structures of fingerprints. The improved Gabor filtering can protect the ridge structure and avoid the spurious ridges effectively. In addition, a Fourier-Transformation based method is proposed to compute the orientation field more precisely and efficiently. Experimental results show that the algorithm not only makes improvement on the minutiae extraction accuracy but also saves the time spent on the process.