On Latent Fingerprint Enhancement

Automatic feature extraction in latent fingerprints is a challenging problem due to poor quality of most latents, such as unclear ridge structures, overlapped lines and letters, and overlapped fingerprints. We proposed a latent fingerprint enhancement algorithm which requires manually marked region of interest (ROI) and singular points. The core of the proposed enhancement algorithm is a novel orientation field estimation algorithm, which fits orientation field model to coarse orientation field estimated from skeleton outputted by a commercial fingerprint SDK. Experimental results on NIST SD27 latent fingerprint database indicate that by incorporating the proposed enhancement algorithm, the matching accuracy of the commercial matcher was significantly improved.