Fingerprint enhancement based on the directional filter bank

Fingerprints have been used as a means to identify individuals uniquely for a very long time in various situations. In order to achieve robust performance of an automatic fingerprint identification/verification system, it is essential to be associated with a fingerprint enhancement algorithm in the minutiae extraction stage. We present a novel fingerprint enhancement system based on the directional filter bank. The directional filter bank is a maximally decimated filter bank with perfect reconstruction property that is able to decompose wedge-shape frequency components by using an 1-D filter prototype. By using the newly improved visualizable subbands in addition to the previous features of the directional filter bank, an efficient enhancement can be achieved in terms of both computation and memory saving.