Fingerprint Orientation Field Enhancement

This paper presents a new method to enhance the fingerprint orientation image. Orientation, as a global feature of fingerprint, is very important to image preprocessing methods used in automatic fingerprint identification systems (AFIS). The most popular, gradient-based method is very sensitive to noise (image quality). Proposed algorithm is an application of gradient-based method combined with more resistant to noise pixel-alignment-based method. Experimental results show that the proposed method is robust to noise and still maintaining accurate values in high-curvature areas.