A Comparative Study of Fingerprint Enhancement Algorithms

Biometrics is one of the most popular methods for the identification of persons. Among all the biometric techniques, the fingerprint identification has been the most captivating because of their wide use. An enhancement algorithm is applied on the input fingerprint image to improve the image quality and to repair broken ridges. There are different enhancement schemes used for enhancing an image which includes Histogram Equalization, Fast Fourier Transformed enhancement and Gabor Filter. There are several factors that affect the quality of the acquired fingerprint image such as presence of scars, variations of the pressure between the fingers, and acquisition sensor etc. This paper shows the work performed on the database of fingerprint image acquired with a sensor. Three different enhancement algorithms are applied on the input image and the qualities of the reconstructed image are compared using Mean Square Error, Signal Pick to Noise Ratio...etc.