An Efficient Fingerprint Ridge Distance Estimation Using Typical Image Blocks

The average ridge distance of fingerprint images is a very important parameter for fingerprint image enhancement, which will greatly affect the performance of fingerprint recognition. A method of efficient ridge distance estimation based on typical image blocks is proposed. First, we obtain some typical candidate image blocks through the initial selection according to the orientation curvature of each block; Then better quality blocks from these candidate blocks are selected by taking quality strategy into account, while the remaining blocks are used to compute ridge distance using statistical window method; Finally, the average ridge distance is estimated through averaging several ridge distances in the remaining blocks. The experimental results show that our method is fast enough for real applications and is robust and reliable in estimating average fingerprint ridge distance.