An improved 3-step contactless fingerprint image enhancement approach for minutiae detection

Fingerprint enhancement is a critical step in fingerprint recognition systems. There are many existing contact-based fingerprint image enhancement methods and they have their own strengths and weaknesses. However, image enhancement approaches that can be used for contactless fingerprints are rarely considered and the number of such approaches is limited. Furthermore, the performance of existing contact-based fingerprint enhancement methods on the contactless fingerprint samples are unsatisfactory. Therefore, in this paper we propose an improved 3-step fingerprint image quality enhancement approach, which can be used for enhancing contactless fingerprint samples. The evaluation results show that, the proposed enhancement method significantly increases the number of detected minutiae, and improves the performance of fingerprint recognition system by reducing 7% and 15% EER compared to existing methods, respectively.