Fingerprint enhancement using STFT analysis

Contrary to popular belief, despite decades of research in fingerprints, reliable fingerprint recognition is still an open problem. Extracting features out of poor quality prints is the most challenging problem faced in this area. This paper introduces a new approach for fingerprint enhancement based on short time Fourier transform (STFT) Analysis. STFT is a well-known technique in signal processing to analyze non-stationary signals. Here we extend its application to 2D fingerprint images. The algorithm simultaneously estimates all the intrinsic properties of the fingerprints such as the foreground region mask, local ridge orientation and local ridge frequency. Furthermore we propose a probabilistic approach of robustly estimating these parameters. We experimentally compare the proposed approach to other filtering approaches in literature and show that our technique performs favorably. 2006 Published by Elsevier Ltd on behalf of Pattern Recognition Society. PACS: 1.000; 1.001; 7.002; 7.008