Identification of critical bands in DCT domain representation for fingerprint recognition

The low frequency sub bands of Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) and Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) are mostly used for recognition purposes. In this paper, we propose that frequency sub bands other than low frequency sub bands contain discriminative information and can be more helpful in recognition purposes. As a result, the hypothesis was checked on the fingerprint images as fingerprint images have finer and sharper details and higher frequency sub bands contain more information which should be more helpful in recognition than the low frequency sub bands. Our proposed method has accomplished promising performance. Medium and higher frequency sub bands outperform low frequency sub bands outperforms low frequency sub bands in terms of recognition rates.