Designing of Fingerprint Enhancement Based on Curved Region Based Ridge Frequency Estimation

Fingerprint enhancement algorithm is used to improve the clarity of ridges and valleys of input fingerprint images. These kind of algorithm make them more suitable for the minutiae extraction algorithm. The ultimate criterion for evaluating such an enhancement algorithm is the total amount of “quality” improvement when the algorithm is applied to the noisy input fingerprint images. There are various biometric features for personal identification but Fingerprints are today the most widely used biometric features for the same. Many automatic systems are there for fingerprint enhancement which is based on ridges and valleys. Automatic fingerprint recognition system is totally based on Fingerprint enhancement. It is necessary to choose the suitable enhancement technique for fingerprint, in order to reduce the post-processing part of the fingerprint recognition system. Different Fingerprint Enhancement techniques have been implemented in the past. These different methods are used by which the image quality is enhanced and Fingerprint Matching techniques are applied. These algorithms contribute to recognize the person and provide authenticity on the basis of physiological or behavioral characteristic possessed by the user. There is a need to develop a system that can be used for fingerprint verification through extracting and matching minutiae in an efficient manner. To achieve good minutiae, initially, extraction is done in fingerprints with varying quality, then preprocessing in form of image enhancement. A fast fingerprint enhancement algorithm, which can adaptively improve the clarity of ridge and valley structures of input fingerprint images based on Curved Region Based Ridge Frequency Estimation, is be implemented. The implementation work is done using MATLAB R2008a, as an implementation platform. Keywords— Enhancement, Fingerprint, Ridges ,Valleys.