Evaluation of fingerprint orientation field correction methods

The estimation of fingerprint Orientation Field (OF) plays an important role in most fingerprint feature extraction algorithms. Many of the later stages in fingerprint feature extraction process (e.g. ridge enhancement, singular points detection) utilize fingerprint OF information as a cornerstone, thus the far-reaching implication of its estimation to the whole recognition process. Unfortunately, the accurate and robust estimation of fingerprint OF in low-quality fingerprint images is difficult and still remains as a challenge until today. This research attempts to evaluate the effectiveness of two well-known fingerprint OF correction methods: The method based on low-pass filtering and least square approximation. The experimental results shows that the classical filter-based method is very efficient in computation and has a comparable performance to the more recent method based on least square approximation.