Fingerprint Image Enhancement and Minutiae Extraction
Raymond Thai
Honours 2003
Abstract
Fingerprints are the oldest and most widely used form of biometric
identification. Despite the widespread use of fingerprints, there is
little statistical theory on the uniqueness of fingerprint minutiae. A
critical step in studying the statistics of fingerprint minutiae is to
reliably extract minutiae from the fingerprint images. However,
fingerprint images are rarely of perfect quality. They may be degraded
and corrupted due to variations in skin and impression
conditions. Thus, image enhancement techniques are employed prior to
minutiae extraction to obtain a more reliable estimation of minutiae
locations.
In this dissertation, I firstly provide discussion on the
methodology and implementation of techniques for fingerprint image
enhancement and minutiae extraction. Experiments using a mixture of
both synthetic test images and real fingerprint images are then
conducted to evaluate the performance of the implemented
techniques. In combination with these techniques, preliminary results
on the statistics of fingerprint images are then presented and
discussed.
Keywords: fingerprint, image enhancement, filtering,
minutiae extraction, image postprocessing, fingerprint statistics.