Fingerprint enhancement using circular gabor filter

Fingerprint minutiae are prevalently used in AFISs. 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 AFIS to make the system robust with respect to the quality of input fingerprint images. Most of existing enhancement methods suffer from mainly two kinds of defects: (1) time consuming and thus unusable in time critical applications; and (2) blocky effect in the enhanced image. This paper follows Hong's Gabor filter based enhancement scheme (IEEE Trans. PAMI, vol.20, no.8, pp. 777-789, 1998) but uses a circle support filter and tunes the filter's frequency and size differently. This scheme can enhance the fingerprint image rapidly and overcome the blocky effect effectively and does improve the performance of minutiae detection.