Quality Measures of Fingerprint Images

In an automatic fingerprint identification system, it is desirable to estimate the image quality of the fingerprint image before it is processed for feature extraction. This helps in deciding on the type of image enhancements that are needed and in deciding on thresholds for the matcher in the case that dynamic thresholds are used. In this paper, we propose a Gabor-feature based method for determining the quality of the fingerprint images. An image is divided into N w ×w blocks. Gabor features of each block are computed first, then the standard deviation of the m Gabor features is used to determine the quality of this block. The results are compared with an existing model of quality estimation. Our analysis shows that our method can estimate the image quality accurately.