The enhancement of low quality fingerprint based on fractional calculus mask

The performance of automatic fingerprint recognition systems highly depends on the quality of the fingerprint images. So it is important to implement a fingerprint image enhancement process before feature extraction and matching stages. In this paper, we propose an effective filtering method based on a fractional calculus mask to enhance fingerprint image. First an eight direction image is obtained in a convenient way. Then based on fractional calculus, a mask has been got on the eight direction of negative x-coordinate, positive x-coordinate, negative y-coordinate, positive y-coordinate, left downward diagonal, left upward diagonal, right downward diagonal, and right upward diagonal. Finally the mask is used to filter and enhance fingerprint images according to eight direction image. The proposed algorithm has been evaluated on the databases of fingerprint verification competition 2004DB3 (FVC2004). The experimental results confirm that the proposed algorithm is effective for low quality fingerprint image enhancement.