Fingerprint compression using a piecewise-uniform pyramid lattice vector quantization

A new compression algorithm for fingerprint images is introduced. Using lattice vector quantization (LVQ), a technique for determining the largest radius of the lattice and its scaling factor is presented. The design is based on obtaining the smallest possible expected total distortion (ETD) measure, using a given bit budget, while using the smallest codebook size. In the proposed piecewise-uniform pyramid LVQ, the wedge problem encountered with the pyramidal lattice point shells is resolved. At very low bit rates, for the coefficients with high-frequency content, the positive-negative mean (PNM) method is proposed to improve the resolution of the reconstructed image. The proposed algorithm results in a high compression ratio and a high reconstructed image quality with a low computational load compared to other existing algorithms.