Fingerprint image: pre- and post-processing

Automatic Fingerprint Identification Systems (AFIS) are widely used for personal identification due to uniqueness of fingerprints. Minutiaebased fingerprint matching techniques are normally used for fingerprint matching. Fingerprint matching results and their accuracy depends on presence of valid minutiae. In this paper, we present a new technique for fingerprint image post-processing. This post-processing is used to eliminate a large number of false extracted minutiae from skeletonised fingerprint images. We propose a windowing post-processing method that takes into account the neighbourhood of each minutia within defined window and check for minutia validation and invalidation. We also present a complete pre-processing system including new segmentation technique that is required to extract region of interest (ROI) accurately from a fingerprint image. The results are confirmed by visual inspections of validated minutiae of the FVC2004 reference fingerprint image database. Experimental results obtained by the proposed approach show efficient reduction of false minutiae.