Four Slap Fingerprint Segmentation

This paper proposes an efficient segmentation algorithm to extract multiple fingerprints from a four slap fingerprint image. The proposed algorithm divides each slap image into non-overlapping square blocks and identifies foreground and background blocks using average pixel intensity in that block. Blocks are joined to find the foreground block’s connected components. Finally clusters containing finger-tips are selected using geometric characteristics of a finger. It has been tested on IITK four slap fingerprint database of 13380 four slap fingerprint images collected from 1115 subjects in 2 sessions. The algorithm has achieved segmentation accuracy of 98.8%.