Wavelet Based Image Enhancement Techniques for Fingerprint Identification

A critical step in automatic fingerprint identification and verification is to reliably extract minutiae from the input fingerprint images. However, as the performance of a minutiae extraction algorithm depends on the quality of the input fingerprint images, it is essential to incorporate a fingerprint enhancement algorithm in the minutiae extraction module. The aim of this paper is to propose a new method in fingerprint enhancement with application of Wavelet Transform. At present the methods that are in use are the ones involving the use of Gabor filter in wavelet domain. A new technique is being proposed that incorporates wavelet Transform and Separable Gabor Filtering. We have evaluated the performance of the fingerprint image enhancement algorithms using the goodness index of the extracted minutiae and the average Execution time taken by these algorithms.