Curved Gabor Filters for Fingerprint Image Enhancement

Gabor filters play an important role in many application areas for the enhancement of various types of images and the extraction of Gabor features. For the purpose of enhancing curved structures in noisy images, we introduce curved Gabor filters which locally adapt their shape to the direction of flow. These curved Gabor filters enable the choice of filter parameters which increase the smoothing power without creating artifacts in the enhanced image. In this paper, curved Gabor filters are applied to the curved ridge and valley structure of low-quality fingerprint images. First, we combine two orientation field estimation methods in order to obtain a more robust estimation for very noisy images. Next, curved regions are constructed by following the respective local orientation and they are used for estimating the local ridge frequency. Lastly, curved Gabor filters are defined based on curved regions and they are applied for the enhancement of low-quality fingerprint images. Experimental results on the FVC2004 databases show improvements of this approach in comparison to state-of-the-art enhancement methods

Distorted Fingerprint Verification System

Fingerprint verification is one of the most reliable personal identification methods. Fingerprint matching is affected by non-linear distortion introduced in fingerprint impression during the image acquisition process. This non-linear deformation changes both the position and orientation of minutiae. The proposed system operates in three stages: alignment based fingerprint matching, fuzzy clustering and classifier framework. First, an enhanced input fingerprint image has been aligned with the template fingerprint image and matching score is computed. To improve the performance of the system, a fuzzy clustering based on distance and density has been used to cluster the feature set obtained from the fingerprint matcher. Finally a classifier framework has been developed and found that cost sensitive classifier produces better results. The system has been evaluated on fingerprint database and the experimental result shows that system produces a verification rate of 96%. This system plays an important role in forensic and civilian applications.Biometric, Fingerprints, Distortion, Fuzzy Clustering, Cost Sensitive Classifier