%0 Journal Article
%T Fingerprint Image Enhancement Based on Second Directional Derivative of the Digital Image
%A Pauli Kuosmanen
%A Vesa Onnia
%A Marius Tico
%J EURASIP Journal on Advances in Signal Processing
%D 2002
%I Springer
%R 10.1155/s1687617202206010
%X This paper presents a novel approach of fingerprint image enhancement that relies on detecting the fingerprint ridges as image regions where the second directional derivative of the digital image is positive. A facet model is used in order to approximate the derivatives at each image pixel based on the intensity values of pixels located in a certain neighborhood. We note that the size of this neighborhood has a critical role in achieving accurate enhancement results. Using neighborhoods of various sizes, the proposed algorithm determines several candidate binary representations of the input fingerprint pattern. Subsequently, an output binary ridge-map image is created by selecting image zones, from the available binary image candidates, according to a MAP selection rule. Two public domain collections of fingerprint images are used in order to objectively assess the performance of the proposed fingerprint image enhancement approach.
%K fingerprints
%K image enhancement
%K image derivative
%K facet model
%K ridge pattern.
%U http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/S1110865702206010