A modified Gabor filter design method for fingerprint image enhancement

Fingerprint image enhancement is an essential preprocessing step in fingerprint recognition applications. In this paper, we propose a novel filter design method for fingerprint image enhancement, primarily inspired from the traditional Gabor filter (TGF). The previous fingerprint image enhancement methods based on TGF banks have some drawbacks in their image-dependent parameter selection strategy, which leads to artifacts in some cases. To address this issue, we develop an improved version of the TGF, called the modified Gabor filter (MGF). Its parameter selection scheme is image-independent. The remarkable advantages of our MGF over the TGF consist in preserving fingerprint image structure and achieving image enhancement consistency. Experimental results indicate that the proposed MGF enhancement algorithm can reduce the FRR of a fingerprint matcher by approximately 2% at a FAR of 0.01%. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.