Segmentation of low quality fingerprint images

This paper presents a new algorithm to segment fingerprint images. The algorithm uses four features, the global mean, the local mean, variance and coherence of the image to achieve the fingerprint segmentation. Based on these features, a rule based system is built to segment the image. The proposed algorithm is implemented in three stages; pre-processing, segmentation, and postprocessing. Gaussian filter and histogram equalization are applied in the pre-processing stage. Segmentation is applied using the local features. Finally, fill the gaps algorithm and a modified version of Otsu thresholding are invoked in the post-processing stage. In order to evaluate the performance of this method, experiments are performed on FVC2000 DB1. Segmentation of 100 images is performed and compared with manual examinations of human experts. It shows that the proposed algorithm achieves a correct segmentation of 82% of images under test.