2021 9th International Conference on Information and Communication Technology (ICoICT)

Fingerprint Enhancement using Iterative Contextual

Filtering for Fingerprint Matching
1st Brama Yoga Satria 2nd Agus Bejo 3rd Risanuri Hidayat
2021 9th International Conference on Information and Communication Technology (ICoICT) | 978-1-6654-0447-1/21/$31.00 ©2021 IEEE | DOI: 10.1109/ICoICT52021.2021.9527482

Department of Electrical and Department of Electrical and Department of Electrical and

Information Technology Information Technology Information Technology
Faculty of Engineering, Gadjah Mada Faculty of Engineering, Gadjah Mada Faculty of Engineering, Gadjah Mada
University University University
Yogyakarta, Indonesia Yogyakarta, Indonesia Yogyakarta, Indonesia
brama.y.s@mail.ugm.ac.id agusbj@ugm.ac.id risanuri@ugm.ac.id

Abstract—Fingerprint matching depends on the quality of the
fingerprint images. When fingerprint image quality is low, it can
degrade the performance of fingerprint matching significantly.
Fingerprint images are often contaminated by noise. Therefore,
image quality is crucial for fingerprint matching. In this paper,
an image enhancement algorithm in which contextual filtering
is applied iteratively to a fingerprint image has been proposed.
The main idea of the algorithm is to iterate the output of the
Gabor filter to get better enhancement and matching
performance. The result of the algorithm has five filtered images
due to five times iteration. It showed that the proposed method
is significantly better based on Equal Error Rate (EER)
compared to the Gabor filter and the modified Gabor filter. The
proposed method surpassed the Gabor filter by 3.08 % and the
modified Gabor filter by 2.95 %.
Keywords—fingerprint enhancement, feature extraction,
fingerprint matching, iterative contextual filtering, fingerprint
recognition
I. INTRODUCTION
The fingerprint matching process heavily relies on the
quality of the fingerprint image. A better-quality fingerprint
image will bring up more fingerprint features that matched.
Meanwhile, a bad quality image from a fingerprint that is too
dry or wet may create many spurious features and miss several
genuine features. Therefore, creating a fingerprint
enhancement algorithm that ables the improvement of the
quality of noisy fingerprints is crucial. It will help more
fingerprint features in fingerprint images to be detected. In the
end, fingerprint image enhancement can improve fingerprint
matching performance to increase its accuracy.
There are several types of regions in a fingerprint image.
The first type is the well-defined region. The fingerprint ridges
and valleys in this region are contrasting with each other. The
second type is the recoverable corrupted region. The
fingerprint ridges and valleys in this region are corrupted by a
small amount of noise such as crease, smudges, etc. The last
type is the unrecoverable corrupted region. The fingerprint
ridges and valleys in this region are heavily corrupted by such
a severe amount of noise and distortion that no ridges and
valleys are visible. The fingerprint enhancement algorithm has
a function to enhance these types of regions. In well-defined
regions, the fingerprint pattern has good information.
Therefore, there is no need to do a lot of enhancement in this
region. In recoverable regions, there are a lot of fingerprint
patterns that can be improved due to noises. Then, the
algorithm should improve this area as best it can. In an
unrecoverable region, there are a lot of fingerprint patterns that
cannot be improved due to the high disruption of noises, so
the algorithm should at least mark this region as unrecoverable
regions.
The enhancement methods such as contextual filters are
widely used in the fingerprint enhancement process [1]. This
method aims to improve the clarity of ridges and valleys. In
contextual filtering, the components used to represent
fingerprint patterns are local orientation, frequency, and
quality. These three things are used to create the filter for each
block on the fingerprint image. In the fingerprint enhancement
literature, various methods of contextual filters have been
proposed. They may have different approaches to the filtering
process, but the processes that occur in them tend to be the
same. Contextual filters have two main purposes. First, they
tried to connect the small gaps and fills the impurities due to
noises. Second, they tried to escalate the contrast level
between the ridges and valleys, also isolate lateral linked
ridges.
The Gabor filter proposed by Hong et al. [2] is contextual
filtering that is often used for fingerprint enhancement. Gabor
filters make use of the frequency and orientation of the
fingerprint image patterns in the process. The filters have the
optimal combined resolution in the frequency and spatial
domains. Local ridge frequency is the basis for determining
the frequency of the filter. Meanwhile, local ridge orientation
is the basis for determining the orientation of the filter. This
approach may create spurious ridges and valleys, especially in
small fingerprint images. An improvement of the Gabor filter
by Garge et al. [3] proposed a modified Gabor filter's kernel
to enhance the image quality and computation. This filter uses
the wavelength as the feature to create the Gabor kernel.
However, the filter's performance had reduced in small-size
fingerprint images. Other filtering methods in the spatial
domain have been proposed by various authors [4] [5] [6].
Hence, this paper proposes a new enhancement algorithm
in which contextual filtering is applied iteratively to a
fingerprint image. The main idea of the algorithm is to iterate
the output of the Gabor filter to the first step of the whole
algorithm. First, apply histogram equalization to eliminate
minor noise in the fingerprint image. Second, normalize the
fingerprint image to reduce the variation in gray-level values
along ridges and valleys. Then find the region of interest of
the fingerprint image using the segmentation process to reduce
computation size. Third, before applying the Gabor filter to
the fingerprint image, ridge frequency, and orientation needed
to be determined. Thus, going to be the components for
creating a Gabor filter-bank. The Gabor filter outputs will be
iterated respectively. For each iteration, the filtered images
will enter the feature extraction and matching process. In the
end, the enhancement results and the equal error rate in each
iteration are going to be analyzed.

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 II. METHODOLOGY
The flowchart of the proposed method showed in Figure
1 is divided into several sections: image enhancement, feature
extraction, and matching. The following sub-sections explain
the process of each step. The image enhancement process
contains several steps and will be explained in more detail.
Fig. 1. Flowchart of the proposed enhancement algorithm
A. Image Enhancement Block
Figure 2 shows the breakdown process of the image
enhancement block. The block has four main steps: histogram
equalization, normalization, segmentation, and Gabor filter.
The block is used to create contextual filtering using the
Gabor filter.
Fig. 2. Flowchart of the image enhancement block
1) Histogram Equalization: The fingerprint image has
some minor noise in the first place. This image requires an
enhancement to reduce minor noise and increase the clarity
between ridges and valleys from each other. Enhancement is
made by Contrast Limit Adaptive Histogram Equalization
(CLAHE) by Pizer et al. [7] and Zuiderveld [8]. CLAHE is
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the improvement of conventional histogram equalization.
The method can limit the noise produced by the enhancement.
2) Normalization: Normalization is one of the steps in
fingerprint enhancement. It uses pixel components in its
implementation. Therefore, the contrast level between the
ridges and valleys structures does not change. Normalization
also aims to create a new efficient value of the gray level
along the fingerprint ridges and valleys, which facilitates the
next step of processing. The normalization approach used in
this algorithm [2] creates the new gray level values of each
pixel in a fingerprint image as:
, ∙ / ,
, 1
, ∙ / ℎ
where and are the mean and variance of all pixels in the
image. Then and are the desired mean and variance
after the normalization.
3) Segmentation: Segmentation is a step taken to separate
the foreground and the background of the fingerprint image.
The foreground is the part that has a fingerprint pattern, while
the background is the part where there is no fingerprint
pattern in it. Segmentation is necessary to eliminate the
background of the image and areas that are too noisy. It is
based on the calculation of the variance of gray levels. The
fingerprint image segmentation steps are described as
follows. For this algorithm, the image is divided into sub-
blocks of 16x16 size and for each block, the variance will be
determined. The gray-level variance for a block of size WxW
was calculated as shown below:
1 ()* ()*
! " # # $% , & " ' 2
-, +,
where ! " is the variance for block ", image % , is the
gray-level value at pixel , , and & " is the mean gray-
level value for the block ". Then, the root of the variance of
each block is compared with a threshold, if the value obtained
is lower than the threshold, then the corresponding block is
considered as the background of the image and will be
excluded by the subsequent processing.
4) Gabor filter: Gabor filters have two main components
of frequency selective and orientation selective. These
components in a fingerprint image are important things
needed to reduce undesired noise. Since the filter is also a
bandpass filter, it can also improve the contrast level between
ridges and valleys. So far, this is the most popular method for
fingerprint enhancement. The Gabor filter has the general
form [2]:
1 ∅ ∅
/ , , ∅, 1 2 45 6 27 ∅ 3
2 3- 3+
∅ 6 ∅ 9∅ 4
∅ 9∅ 6 ∅ 5
where ∅ is the orientation of the Gabor filter, is the
frequency of a sinusoidal plane wave, 3- and 3+ are the space
constants of the Gaussian envelope along and axes,
respectively. And ∅ , ∅ are the coordinates of , after a
clockwise rotation of the Cartesian axes by an angle of
90> ∅ .
B. Iteration Block fingerprint is assessed based on a threshold. If the score is
The iteration block uses the Gabor filter as the basis for below the threshold value, it is considered a matched
the process. The output of the filter needs to be iterated to get fingerprint. If the score is higher than the threshold value, it
better results. As an illustration, Figure 3 explains how the is considered a non-matched fingerprint.
iteration process works before going to the next steps like
III. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
feature extraction and matching.
Our experiment uses OpenCV and scikit-learn in python
on implementing iterative contextual filtering, feature
extraction, and matching. And our method using a computer
with the specification consists of windows 10 64-bit with
GT720m graphics, Intel core i5 gen 4 processor, and 8 GB
RAM.
A. Dataset
Fig. 3. The iterations process
The experimental results have been conducted on
fingerprint dataset FVC2004 set B to analyze enhancement
Gabor filters process the input fingerprint images % , performance. FVC2004 set B dataset contains 320 fingerprint
to produce enhanced images %* * , * , % , ,…, images: 40 fingerprints with 8 impressions each. Table I
%? ? , ? , respectively. Then, these iteration results enter the shows the overview of the dataset and its characteristics.
feature extraction and matching process. Some datasets have their characteristics in terms of
dimensions, resolution, and data origin.
Since the iteration process is based on the Gabor filter,
the filter equation is modified to allow for as many iterations TABLE I. FVC2004 SET B DATASET CHARACTERISTICS
as desired. Therefore, the modified equations are:
1 ∅B ∅B
Dataset Samples Dimensions Resolution Data Origin
/@A* @ , @ , ∅@ , @ 1 2 45 6 $27 @ ∅B ' 6
2 3-B 3+B
FVC2004 640 × 480
6 9 ∅" 7
80 500 dpi Optical sensor
∅"
DB1B (307 Kpx)
∅B " "

∅B " 9 ∅" "

6 ∅" 8 FVC2004
80
328 × 364
500 dpi Optical sensor
DB2B (119 Kpx)
where " = 0, 1, 2, 3, and 4 are constants to create /* , / , …,
/? , respectively. The maximum value of " is set to 4 due to
Thermal
FVC2004 300 × 480
80 512 dpi sweeping
the iteration only performs five times. Then, ∅@ is the
DB3B (144 Kpx)
sensor
orientation of the Gabor filter and @ is the frequency of a Synthetic
sinusoidal plane wave. And 3- and 3+ are the sigma of the
FVC2004 288 × 384 About 500
80 fingerprint
DB4B (108 Kpx) dpi
generator
Gabor envelope which are the constant space values.

The dataset images will be cropped by 126 × 400 sizes to

C. Feature Extraction
ensure the algorithm performance on small-size fingerprint
In a fingerprint matching system, feature extraction images. As shown in Figure 4, Figure 4(a) is the original
obtains the features in the fingerprint image. Feature image, Figure 4(b) is the cropped image.
extraction has two main steps: feature detection and
descriptor. Feature detection detects reliable features located
in the fingerprint image. Meanwhile, a feature descriptor
extracts the feature so could be used in the fingerprint
matching process. Harris corner [9] and ORB [10] algorithms
are used as feature detection and feature descriptor,
respectively.
D. Matching
Fingerprint matching is an important decision. It declares (a) Original image (b) Cropped image
which feature can be represented as a genuine fingerprint Fig. 4. Example of the original image and the cropped image
feature. Brute-Force matcher [11] is used to match the
For a fair assessment of the proposed method, the Gabor
fingerprint features. It takes the descriptor of one fingerprint
filter [2], and the modified Gabor filter [3], the dataset
feature in the first set and is matched with all other fingerprint
including two types of degradations would be used. FVC2004
features in the second set using some distance calculation.
set B consists of dry and wet fingerprint images. The example
And the closest one is returned as a matched feature.
of fingerprint images with various degradations is shown in
Euclidean distance or Hamming distance can be used as Figure 5.
the distance calculation. Hamming distance is the preferred
one in this case. To calculate the similarity score between two
features, Hamming distance is used to score the feature pairs.
The closer the distance between features, the smaller the
score. To determine the matching result, a matched

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 further analysis regarding the matching performance is
necessary.
C. Fingerprint Matching Performance
The final purpose of the fingerprint enhancement is the
improvement of matching accuracy. Feature extraction and
Dry fingerprint images matching processes had performed on all enhanced images
from the proposed method. The accuracy measurement
techniques for fingerprint matching are False Acceptance
Rate (FAR), False Rejection Rate (FRR), and Equal Error
Rate (EER). EER indicates the accuracy of an algorithm.
Meanwhile, EER was obtained from the intersection point
between FAR and FRR.
IJK>LM>N LO>NP QM I
FGHI T 100% 9)
Wet fingerprint images QRR IJK>LM>N JQMOSPL
VPWXIWP LO>NP QM I
Fig. 5. Example of the wet and dry fingerprint images in FVC2004 set B
FHHI T 100% 10
B. Enhancement using Iterative Contextual Filtering QRR IJK>LM>N JQMOSPL

FGHM FGHM)* FHHM FHHM)*

YYH 11
As outlined in the introduction that fingerprint matching
heavily relies on the quality of the fingerprint image, this 4
study aimed to investigate a possible improvement of noisy
The EER range is from 0 to 100 and is the threshold score.
fingerprint images to produce better fingerprint matching
Therefore, FAR, FRR, and EER at the threshold score are
accuracy. The fingerprint images in the dataset have been
calculated to indicate the accuracy of the algorithms as
enhanced using the proposed method. The output of the
Equation 9, 10, and 11, respectively. Table II compares the
method is five enhanced images. Each image represents the
Equal Error Rate (EER) of each iteration of the proposed
output for each iteration. Figure 6 shows the results obtained
method.
using the proposed method.
TABLE II. EQUAL ERROR RATE (EER) AT EACH ITERATION

Equal Error Rate (%)

Dataset 1st 2nd 3rd 4th 5th
Iteration iteration iteration iteration iteration

FVC2004
41.336 34.908 33.032 35.729 36.424
DB1B

FVC2004
27.867 30.902 32.465 34.097 35.174
DB2B

FVC2004
17.326 10.138 11.597 11.215 15.382
DB3B

FVC2004
37.357 37.118 36.319 34.861 35.138
DB4B

Table II shows that the best EER occurred at different

Fig. 6. Evolution of a noisy fingerprint using the iterative contextual
filtering.
As can be seen in Figure 6, during the first iteration, the noisy
fingerprint image quality was low. The fingerprint image still
had some recoverable regions. However, during the next
iteration, the recoverable regions were recovered completely.
Although the proposed method successfully performed well
to recover the noisy fingerprint image, the matching
performance may not represent the same result. Therefore,
iteration for each dataset. For example, dataset FVC2004
DB1B and DB2B have their best EER at the third iteration
and first iteration. Furthermore, FVC2004 DB3B has its best
EER at the second iteration. Meanwhile, FVC2004 DB4B has
its best EER at the fourth iteration. Please take note that the
datasets have different dimensions and resolution values.
Since FVC2004 DB3B has the highest resolution, this dataset
only needs two iterations to get its best EER. However,
FVC2004 DB4B needs four iterations to get its best EER.
Obviously, due to the small dimensions and low resolution of
the dataset. The proposed method cannot reduce the EER on
the DB2B dataset. This happens because this dataset already
has good quality fingerprint images.
Based on Figure 7, the changes in the EER results for
each iteration can be seen in more detail. Figure 7 shows the
changes in the EER results in the FVC2004 set B over the
iterations.

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 Table III shows that the EER value of the proposed method
is better compared to the Gabor filter and the modified Gabor
filter. The average EER result from the Gabor filter is 30.972
%, the modified Gabor filter is 30.844 %, and the proposed
method is 27.893 %. In general, the proposed method
surpassed the Gabor filter by 3.08 % and the modified Gabor
filter by 2.95 %. Further analysis of the visual results between
these three methods is needed to get a better knowledge of
the enhancement results.
We compared the visual comparison between the two
enhancement methods as shown in Figure 8.

Hong’s Modified Iterative

Dry Fingerprint
Gabor Gabor Contextual
Fig. 7. Equal Error Rate from FVC 2004 set B at each iteration (Image 105_4)
Filter [2] Filter [3] Filtering
DB1B has the best performance among other datasets. From
the first iteration to the third iteration, the EER reduction was
8.304 %. This value is the difference between the first
iteration’s EER and the best iteration EER, which is the third
iteration. In DB3B, the best EER value appears at the third
iteration. Therefore, the EER reduction was 7.188 %. For
DB4B, the best EER value occurs at the fourth iteration. So,
the EER reduction was 2.496 %. However, in DB2B, there is
no EER reduction at all. The proposed method cannot reduce
the ERR value in this dataset. It could happen because the
dataset has several high-quality fingerprint images. Applying Hong’s Modified Iterative
a filter to a good-quality image can remove the genuine Wet Fingerprint
Gabor Gabor Contextual
features from it. In this case, the proposed method cannot (Image 110_7)
Filter [2] Filter [3] Filtering
improve the quality of the DB2B dataset. But overall, the
proposed method still performed well in the other datasets.
D. Comparison with The Gabor Filter and The Modified
Gabor Filter
We conducted quantitative analysis on matching and
enhancement performance between three methods. Those
methods were compared in our experiments: the proposed
method, the Gabor filter [2], and the modified Gabor filter
[3]. The Gabor filter and the Modified Gabor filter have been
performed with the same dataset as the proposed method. The
matching process performed using the FVC protocol [12]. Fig. 8. Fingerprint enhancements comparison with two types of
Then, the feature extraction process contains Harris corner degradations
and ORB as feature detection and feature descriptor,
Figure 8 shows the enhancement results of two fingerprints
respectively. The brute-Force matcher is used as the matching
that belong to the dataset using the Gabor filter, the modified
algorithm. Table III compares the EER of Hong’s Gabor
Gabor filter, and the proposed method. Image 105_4 from
filter, Modified Gabor Filter, and iterative contextual
DB1 is a dry fingerprint image. The recoverable regions in
filtering.
the image recovered completely with the proposed method.
TABLE III. EQUAL ERROR RATE (EER) COMPARISON Meanwhile, the Gabor filter and the modified Gabor filter
could not recover the image completely. The same thing also
Equal Error Rate (%) happened in image 110_7 from DB1. Image 110_7 is a wet
Dataset Hong’s Gabor Modified Gabor Iterative Contextual fingerprint image. The Gabor filter and the modified Gabor
Filter [2] Filter [3] Filtering filter still could not recover the image completely. The
FVC2004 proposed method performed well in recovering the wet
41.336 39.197 33.032
DB1B fingerprint image.
FVC2004 IV. CONCLUSION
27.867 29.833 32.465
DB2B
This paper presents a fingerprint enhancement method
FVC2004 based on iterative contextual filtering. The result of
17.326 15.764 10.138
DB3B
enhancement has five filtered images due to five times
FVC2004
37.357 38.582 34.861
iteration. The proposed method effectively enhanced the dry
DB4B and wet fingerprint images with different characteristics in
Mean 30.972 30.844 27.893 the FVC2004 set B dataset. Experiments showed that the best
EER occurred at different iteration for each dataset. It is due

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to differences in the characteristics of each dataset. The
dataset characteristics such as dimensions, resolution, and
data origin play a significant role in the experiments. Also,
the proposed method shows an improvement regarding the
fingerprint matching accuracy. Experimental results show
that the matching accuracy is improved using the proposed
method. In general, the proposed method surpassed the Gabor
filter by 3.08 % and the modified Gabor filter by 2.95 %. The
visual comparison also shows that the proposed method
performed better restoration capabilities compared to the
Gabor filter and the modified Gabor filter.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors would like to thank the Research Directorate
of Gadjah Mada University for funding this publication
through the Rekognisi Tugas Akhir (RTA) 2021 scheme.
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