A Gabor filter based fingerprint enhancement scheme using average frequency

Fingerprint minutiae are prevalently used in fingerprint recognition systems. The extraction of fingerprint minutiae is heavily affected by the quality of fingerprint images. This leads to the incorporation of a fingerprint enhancement module in fingerprint recognition systems to make the system robust with respect to the quality of input fingerprint images. Most of existing enhancement methods suffer from two main kinds of defects: (1) time consuming and thus unusable in time critical applications; and (2) blocky and directional effects in the enhanced image. This paper proposes an improved fingerprint enhancement scheme based on the Gabor filter timing its frequency to the average frequency of the input image and changing its shape from square to circle and dynamically adjusting the filter's size based on the average frequency. This scheme can enhance the fingerprint image rapidly and overcome the blocky and directional effects and does improve the performance of minutiae detection.