A Gradient Based Approach for Fingerprint Image Segmentation using Morphological Operators

The advancement of science and technology has made the reliable individual recognition and identification systems to become very popular. From the various biometric characteristics, fingerprint is one of the popular method because of its easiness and not much effort is required to acquire fingerprint. First step for an Automated Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS) is the segmentation of fingerprint from the acquired image. During fingerprint segmentation process the input image is decomposed into foreground and background areas. The foreground area contains information that are needed in the automatic fingerprint recognition systems. However, the background is a noisy region that contributes to the extraction of false features. So in an AFIS, fingerprint image segmentation plays an important role in carefully separating ridge like part (foreground) from noisy background. Gradient based method is commonly used for segmentation process. Since gradient estimation is erroneous in noisy images, the study proposes a combination of gradient mask and morphological operations to segment fingerprint foreground effectively. The results obtained prove that the new method is suited for fingerprint segmentation.