Fingerprint Enhancement and its featurespurification
Raju Rajkumar, Th. Churjit Meetei, Shahin Ara Begum, K Hemachandra
Abstract
- It is difficult to extract only genuine minutiae from fingerprints. Enhancement techniques are being used as preprocessing methods for minutiaeextraction. The fingerprint enhancement is a challenging process. To overcome the adverse effect caused by spurious minutiae in fingerprint matching, anew method for fingerprint enhancement is proposed. Since some of the spurious minutiae in the boundary region cannot be remove in the minutiaepurification, we draw a region of interest in the fingerprint image to remove the remaining boundary minutiae which exists as a ridge ending. Theseboundary minutiae affect the accuracy in fingerprint matching. Experimental result shows that the proposed method can eliminate the effect caused byspurious minutiae.
Index Term
- Boundary minutiae, genuine minutiae, spurious minutiae, fingerprint enhancement, FAR, FRR.
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1
I
NTRODUCTION
The fingerprint has many particular properties such asuniqueness, stableness, and inseparability from the host. It hasbeen used for personal verification for more than ten decades[1], and is the most widely used biometrics in day today life. Itcan be represented by a large number of features, including theoverall ridge flow pattern, ridge frequency, location andposition of singular points, location of minutia points, ridgecounts between pairs of minutiae, and location of pores [2]. Allthese features contribute to fingerprint individuality. In thisstudy, minutia base representation of the fingerprints is chosenbecause it has been utilized by forensic experts, and has beenadopted by most of the commercially available AutomatedFingerprint Identification Systems (AFIS). There are two typesof minutiae which are commonly used in AFIS, ridge endingand ridge bifurcation as shown in Fig 1.
a) Ridge bifurcation b) Ridge EndingFig 1. The most common type of Fingerprint feature
These minutiae are totally depend on the input image.Sometimes the input images are very noisy. It is necessary toenhance the input fingerprint image inorder to extract reliableminutiae. A number of enhancement algorithms are available
in the literature. O’ Gorman and Nickers
on [3] have proposeddifferent filters for the fingerprint image enhancement and thek X k mask coefficients are generated, based on the local ridgeorientation. Only three orientation directions are used. Thefour model parameters derived from ridge width (Wmax,
Wmin), valley width (Ẃmax, Ẃmin), and the minimum radius
of curvature are used to describe a fingerprint. It is assumed
that the Wmax + Wmin = Ẃmax +Ẃmin . The mask is
convoled with the input image. The enhanced image isbinarized and post processed. Mehtre [4] computes thedirectional image, representing the local ridge direction, in ablock of size 16 X 16 pixels. For this purpose, local gray levelintensity variances along eight different directions arecomputed. The direction with the least variance is the desiredleast direction. A set of eight 7 X 7 convolution masks isapplied to the input image for ridge enhancement. Thefingerprint area is segmented from the background beforeapplying standard locally adaptive thresholding and thinningoperators. Features are obtained based on the computation ofthe connection number (CN) described in [3]. Sherlock et. al.[5] have studied the enhanced fingerprint images by using adirectional Fourier filter. The direction of the filtering isdecided by the local ridge orientation. A 32 X 32 window isused to obtain a projection of the pattern in 16 directions. Theprojection with the maximum variance is the desired ridgedirection for the window. The result of the enhancement iscompared with feature extraction techniques used in a systemby the UK Home office. Hong et. al. [6] introduced a newfingerprint enhancement algorithm which decomposes theinput fingerprint image into a set of filtered images. A set ofband pass filters can efficiently remove the undesired noiseand preserve the true ridge/valley structure. Gabor filters [7]have both frequency
–
selective and orientation-selectiveproperties and have optimal joint resolution in both spatial andfrequency domains. Therefore, it is beneficial to use Gaborfilters as bandpass filters to remove the noise and preserve trueridge/valley structure. One of the heuristics to detect the
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Raju Rajkumar is with the Computer Science Department, Assamuniversity, Silchar, India.
Th. Churjit Meetei is with the Computer Science Department, AssamUniversity, Silcha, India.
Shahin Ara Begum is with the Computer Science Department, AssamUniversity, Silchar, India.
K Hemachandran is with the Computer Science Department, AssamUniversity, Silchar, India.
JOURNAL OF COMPUTING, VOLUME 4, ISSUE 5, MAY 2012, ISSN 2151-9617https://sites.google.com/site/journalofcomputingWWW.JOURNALOFCOMPUTING.ORG78
spurious minutiae resulting from these crack, is based on theobservation that these minutiae are anti-aligned and the regionbetween them is brighter than the average brightness of theforeground region. Hong et. al.[8] improved thecomputationally expensive enhancement method [6], whichmakes it unsuitable for an online verification system. Theauthors have presented a fast enhancement algorithm toenhance adaptively, the ridge and furrow structures using boththe local ridge orientation and local frequency information.Yang et. al.[9] modified the method proposed by Hong et. al.[8] by discarding the inaccurate prior assumption of sinusoidalplane wave, and making the parameter selection processindependent of fingerprint image. Rajkumar andHemachandran [15] used both FFT and Gaussian filter forfingerprint enhancement in preprocessing stage. FFT have 32 X32 pixel block size and Gaussian filter gives little blur by giving
σ =0.5 which used in
removing the hairy structure when it isthinning.
2
P
ROPOSED
A
LGORITHM
An automatic fingerprint identification system consists ofvarious processing stages. The overall process of the proposedalgorithm can be divided into four main operations:2.1
Image enhancement2.2
Binarization and thinning2.3
Feature extraction and its purification2.4
Demarcation of boundary feature
2.1. Fingerprint Enhancement
In this study two methods are used for Image enhancementprocess: (i) Normalization and (ii) Fast Fourier Transformation.
Fig 2. Proposed algorithm for Fingerprint Identification System
(i) Normalization
Normalization is done so that the gray level values lies withina given set of values. The fingerprint image is normalized tohave a predefined mean and variance. The normalization isrequired as the fingerprint image usually has distorted levelsof gray values among the ridges and furrows. This is a pixel-wise operation although it does not change the ridge andfurrows structure. Let I(i,j) denotes the gray-level value at pixel(i,j), M and VAR denote the estimated mean and variance of I,respectively, and G(i,j) denote the normalized gray-level valueat pixel (i,j).The norma
lized image is defined as follows [ 9]:
,
=
+
VAR
O
I
i,j
−
M
2
VAR
,
,
>
.
−
,
−
2
,
,
≤
(1)
where MO and VARO are the desired mean and variancevalues, respectively.Normalization is achieved by histogram equalization. Itincreases the local contrast in an image. Thus the intensities canbe distributed on the histogram. This allows for areas of lowerlocal contrast to gain a higher contrast without affecting theglobal contrast. Histogram equalization accomplishes this byeffectively spreading out the intensity values.
(ii) Fast Fourier Transformation
The primary enhancement is done through Fouriertransformation. Initially the fingerprint image is divided intosmall processing blocks (32 X 32 pixels) and the Fouriertransformation is performed according to the followingequation:
,
=
.
−
1
=0
.
−
1
=0
,
∗
exp
−
2
∗
+
(2)
for u = 0,1,2,….,31 and v = 0,1,2,….,31.
In order to enhance a specific block by its dominantfrequencies, the FFT of the block was multiplied by itsmagnitude a set of times. Where the magnitude of the originalFFT = |F(u,v)|.The enhanced block is obtained according to
g
x,y
=F
−
1
F
u,v
∗
|F
u,v
|
K
(3)where F-1 (F(u,v)) is done by:
,
=1
−
1
=0
,
−
1
=0
∗
exp
2
∗
+
(4)
for
x
= 0, 1, 2, ..., 31 and y = 0, 1, 2, ..., 31.
The k in (3) is an experimentally determined constant, as k= 0.45. While having a higher "k" value improves theappearance of the ridges, by filling up small holes in ridges andhaving a too high "k" value can result in false joining of ridges.Thus a termination might become a bifurcation.
2.2. Binarization and Thinning
This process is used to convert the gray scale image totwo bit image (black and white) and after the ridge pixel iseliminate to one pixel wide. The details of this process aredescribed below:
(i) Binarization
The Fingerprint image binarization is to transform the8-bit gray fingerprint image to a 1-bit image with 0 value forridges and 1 value for furrows. After the operation, ridges in
FingerprintimageFingerprintfeature
Binarizationand ThinningFeatureextraction &purificationTaking ROI
Imageenhancement
JOURNAL OF COMPUTING, VOLUME 4, ISSUE 5, MAY 2012, ISSN 2151-9617https://sites.google.com/site/journalofcomputingWWW.JOURNALOFCOMPUTING.ORG79
the fingerprint are highlighted with black color while furrowswith white. We implement a threshold value 100 fortransforming a pixel value to 1 when the value is larger thanthe threshold and 0 for vice versa.
(ii) Thinning
Ridge thinning is to eliminate the redundant pixels of theridges till the ridge is just one pixel wide. No further removalof the pixels should be possible after completion of thinningprocess. The proposed algorithm used the built-inMorphological thinning function in MATLAB environmentThe objective of a good thinning algorithm are:1.
To obtain a thinned fingerprint image with a single pixelwidth and no discontinuities.2.
To eliminate the noise and singular pixels.
2.3. Feature extraction and its purification
There are two types of feature in the fingerprint identificationsystem: Minutiae based approach and Image based approach.Minutiae based approach is the most common method used infingerprint identification system. Many number of spuriousminutiae are present while extraction these minutiae. Thesespurious minutiae are needed to remove for higher accuracy ofmatching. The method of minutiae extraction and removespurious minutiae are explained below:
(i) Minutiae
Minutiae are extracted by identifying a pixel value in the ridgeorientation flow. If the central is 1 and has only 1 one-valueneighbor, then the central pixel is a termination and if thecentral is 1 and has 3 one-value neighbor, then the central pixelis a bifurcation. If the central is 1 and has 2 one-valueneighbor, then the central pixel is a usual pixel.
(ii) Remove spurious minutiae
The minutiae extracted in the above section includes manyspurious minutiae. These spurious minutiae will significantlyaffect the accuracy of matching if they are simply regarded asgenuine minutiae. A threshold D is used to eliminate thespurious minutiae under the following conditions:1. if the distance between a termination and a bifurcation issmaller than D.2. if the distance between two bifurcations is smaller than D3. if the distance between two terminations is smaller than DThe experimental value of D in the proposed algorithm is 6.
2.4. Demarcation of boundary feature
Some spurious minutiae may still available in the boundary ofthe ridge orientation flow as shown in fig. 3 (a). These spuriousminutiae (i.e. boundary minutiae) cannot be eliminated byusing threshold D. So it is required to draw a region of interest(within the ridge orientation) for eliminating boundaryminutiae. We use the ROI tools of MATLAB, to draw the ROI.Because of the different shape and size of the fingerprints, it isdifficult to have a suitable robust algorithm for the region ofinterest. The region of interest as shown in Fig 3(b) is drawnmanually. Once we defined the ROI, we can eliminate theboundary minutiae which are located outside the ROI. Theimage after elimination of boundary minutiae is shown in Fig 3(c).
(a)
(b)(c)Fig 3 a) before suppression of external minutiae b) ROI of the given imagec)After suppression of external minutiae
.
3
E
XPERIMENTAL
R
ESULT
The algorithm which is described in the previous section hasbeen implemented and tested in MATLAM 7.3.0. Thefingerprint images, used in this study are taken from thestandard Fingerprint Verification Competition (FCV) 2004database[14] which contains hundreds of fingerprint image.The execution time of each process is shown in Table 1.
ImagenoFingerprintEnhancementBinarization &thinningFeatureextraction &purification1_4 0.333 0.625 2.7323_3 0.448 0.574 3.1194_5 0.392 0.771 3.1765_4 0.416 0.779 2.9056_3 0.393 0.742 2.5837_6 0.397 0.774 2.6989_3 0.389 0.903 3.01210_6 0.334 0.757 3.55211_1 0.414 0.859 3.1813_2 0.388 0.645 2.986
Table 1: Execution time (in seconds) of the proposed algorithm
.
The calculation of execution time does not include thedrawing of region of interest as it is drawn manually. Theaverage execution time is 3.9 seconds. The performance ofverification system is tested using False Acceptance Rate(FAR) and False Reject Rate (FRR). FAR is the percentage ofimposter fingerprints accepted by the system, and FRR is
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