Palmprint Images Enhancement Using Steerable Filters based Fuzzy Unsharp Masking

Palm lines include principal lines and wrinkles, which can uniquely describe an individual palmprint. On motive of palmprint image enhancement is to highlight palm lines. In this paper, a steerable filters based fuzzy unsharp masking algorithm is presented to enhance the contrast of a palmprint image. This method introduces the fuzzy set theory into the unsharp masking scheme. Moreover, in the method, we replace a highpass filter with steerable filters in unsharp masking scheme. In order to further enhance the contrast of wrinkles, a half open membership function is proposed to transform the output of steerable filters into fuzzy domain. The experimental results clearly show that our method not only improves the mage quality of palmprint wrinkles, but can get a better recognition performance.