Improved Fingerprint Image Segmentation and Reconstruction of Low Quality Areas

One of the main reason for false recognition is noise added to fingerprint images during the acquisition step. Hence, the improvement of the enhancement step affects general accuracy of automatic recognition systems. In one of our previous publications we introduced hierarchically linked extended features -- the new set of features which not only includes additional fingerprint features individually but also contains the information about their relationships such as line adjacency information at minutiae points or links between neighbouring fingerprint lines. In this work we present the application of the extended features to preprocessing and enhancement. We use structural information for improving the segmentation step, as well as connecting disrupted fingerprint lines and recovering missing minutiae. Experiments show a decrease in the error rate in matching.