Dry fingerprint image enhancement using fuzzy morphology

The quality of fingerprint image greatly affects the performance of minutiae extraction and the process of matching in fingerprint identification system. In order to improve the performance of the fingerprint identification system, a fuzzy morphology technique is proposed in this paper to enhancement oily fingerprint images. Experimental results, using the DB_ITS_2009 database [15] indicated that the proposed method did enhance the quality of fingerprint image. The new proposed method increased the fingerprint identification rate from 82% to 96% when compared withan adaptive pre-processing method based on binary image morphology.