Two Stage Fingerprint Image Enhancement Algorithm by Anisotropic Diffusion

Abstract

A new fingerprint enhancement algorithm is presented. The technique consists of two anisotropic diffusion schemes. One is the coherence-enhancing diffusion. Another is the modified edge-enhancing diffusion. At first, the degraded fingerprint image is processed by the coherence-enhancing diffusion to obtain the initial processed image. And then, the modified edge-enhancing diffusion operates on the initial processed image to obtain the final enhancement image. The tests show the proposed new method gets the better performance obviously compared to the original coherence-enhancing diffusion-based method.