Removal of digitization errors in fingerprint ridgelines using B-splines

Abstract

Most of the contemporary automatic fingerprint identification systems (AFIS) are based on a dual strategy of combining the minutiae information with the ridge topography in order to improve the overall matching performance. To ensure the efficiency and robustness of such an AFIS, it is necessary, therefore, to rectify the abnormalities or aberrations of the underlying ridge topography, in general, and to smoothen the uneven/noisy ridgelines, in particular. The proposed work deals with one such problem besetting fingerprint analysis—the problem of eliminating digitization errors that usually creep in during fingerprint acquisition or during preprocessing. The method mainly involves fitting of B-splines for a set of control points chosen appropriately for each ridgeline in a fingerprint image. These fitted splines, in turn, can be used to reconstruct the concerned fingerprint, which, after the rectification procedure, becomes almost devoid of such digitization error. With a proper “smoothness parameter” that determines the extent to which a ridgeline is smoothed, the structural information of the corrected ridgelines produces improved results on fingerprint matching. Experimental results on several databases have been reported, which clearly demonstrate the strength and elegance of the proposed algorithm.