• International Journal of Computer Science & Network Security
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• v.24 no.1
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• pp.163-177
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• 2024

The fingerprint image quality relies on the clearness of separated ridges by valleys and the uniformity of the separation. The condition of skin still dominate the overall quality of the fingerprint. However, the identification performance of such system is very sensitive to the quality of the captured fingerprint image. Fingerprint image quality analysis and enhancement are useful in improving the performance of fingerprint identification systems. A fuzzy technique is introduced in this paper for both fingerprint image quality analysis and enhancement. First, the quality analysis is performed by extracting four features from a fingerprint image which are the local clarity score (LCS), global clarity score (GCS), ridge_valley thickness ratio (RVTR), and the Global Contrast Factor (GCF). A fuzzy logic technique that uses Mamdani fuzzy rule model is designed. The fuzzy inference system is able to analyse and determinate the fingerprint image type (oily, dry or neutral) based on the extracted feature values and the fuzzy inference rules. The percentages of the test fuzzy inference system for each type is as follow: For dry fingerprint the percentage is 81.33, for oily the percentage is 54.75, and for neutral the percentage is 68.48. Secondly, a fuzzy morphology is applied to enhance the dry and oily fingerprint images. The fuzzy morphology method improves the quality of a fingerprint image, thus improving the performance of the fingerprint identification system significantly. All experimental work which was done for both quality analysis and image enhancement was done using the DB_ITS_2009 database which is a private database collected by the department of electrical engineering, institute of technology Sepuluh Nopember Surabaya, Indonesia. The performance evaluation was done using the Feature Similarity index (FSIM). Where the FSIM is an image quality assessment (IQA) metric, which uses computational models to measure the image quality consistently with subjective evaluations. The new proposed system outperformed the classical system by 900% for the dry fingerprint images and 14% for the oily fingerprint images.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.47 no.2
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• pp.77-85
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• 2010

Fingerprint image quality checking is one of the most important issues in on-line fingerprint recognition because the recognition performance is largely affected by the quality of fingerprint images. In the past, many related fingerprint quality checking methods have typically considered the local quality of fingerprint. However, It is necessary to estimate the global quality of fingerprint to judge whether the fingerprint can be used or not in on-line recognition systems. Therefore, in this paper, we propose both local and global-based methods to calculate the fingerprint quality. Local fingerprint quality checking algorithm considers both the condition of the input fingerprints and orientation estimation errors. The 2D gradients of the fingerprint images were first separated into two sets of 1D gradients. Then，the shapes of the PDFs(Probability Density Functions) of these gradients were measured in order to determine fingerprint quality. And global fingerprint quality checking method uses neural network to estimate the global fingerprint quality based on local quality values. We also analyze the matching performance using FVC2002 database. Experimental results showed that proposed quality check method has better matching performance than NFIQ(NIST Fingerprint Image Quality) method.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information Security & Cryptology
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• v.17 no.2
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• pp.29-40
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• 2007

The purpose of this research is to propose a method for scoring the quality of a fingerprint image using the local information derived from the fingerprint image. In previous works for the quality measuring, most of the quality scores are related to the performance of a matching algorithm, and this makes the quality result more subjective. The quality score of a fingerprint image proposed in this work is sensor-independent, source-independent and matcher-independent one, and this concept of fingerprint sample quality results in effective improvement of the system performance. In this research, a new definition of fingerprint image quality and a new method for measuring the quality are proposed. For the experiments, several sub-databases from FVCs are used and the proposed method showed reasonable results for the test database. The proposed method can be used in various systems for the numerous purposes since the quality scores generated by the proposed method are based on the idea that the quality of fingerprint should be sensor-independent, source-independent and matcher-independent.

• Journal of KIISE:Software and Applications
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• v.31 no.7
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• pp.911-921
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• 2004

Accurate minutiae extraction from input fingerprint images is one of the critical modules in robust automatic fingerprint identification system. However, the performance of a minutiae extraction is heavily dependent on the quality of the input fingerprint images. If the preprocessing is performed according to the fingerprint image characteristics in the image enhancement step, the system performance will be more robust. In this paper, we propose a knowledge-based preprocessing method, which extracts S features (the mean and variance of gray values, block directional difference, orientation change level, and ridge-valley thickness ratio) from the fingerprint images and analyzes image quality with Ward's clustering algorithm, and enhances the images with respect to oily/neutral/dry characteristics. Experimental results using NIST DB 4 and Inha University DB show that clustering algorithm distinguishes the image Quality characteristics well. In addition, the performance of the proposed method is assessed using quality index and block directional difference. The results indicate that the proposed method improves both the quality index and block directional difference.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information Security & Cryptology
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• v.17 no.6
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• pp.19-28
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• 2007

The purpose of this paper is to present a new measure for fingerprint image quality assessment that has a considerable effect on evaluation of fingerprint databases. This paper introduces a hybrid segmentation method for measuring an image quality and evaluates the experimental results using various fingerprint databases. This study compares the performance of the proposed hybrid segmentation using variance and coherence of fingerprints against the NIST's NFIQ program. Although NFIQ is a most widely used tool, it classifies the image quality into 5 levels. However, the proposed hybrid method is developed to be conformant to the ISO standards and accordant to human visual perception. The experimental results demonstrate that the hybrid method is able to produce finer quality measures.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.23 no.4
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• pp.1066-1071
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• 1998

This paper aims to examine the relationship between the directional characteristics and the quality for fingerprint image as preprocessing stage for adative image enchancement. In order to do that, we transformed the original images into directional images and set up the subimage size of 16, 32, 64 and the direction of 1, 2, 3, 4. Then we extracted the accumulated directional value as the measurement of quality for fingerprint images. By using the clustering algirthm, we performed an analytic experiemnt with the result. Finally, we could extract the optimal subimage size and directional characteristics of fingerprint image.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.17 no.6
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• pp.287-295
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• 2017

This study is aimed at observing effects of fingerprint image quality on various photographing conditions in the aspect of resolution. Discrimination between two friction ridges plays an important role in the value of fingerprint image, and it can be confirmed with quantification of pixels of boundary region which is existing between two friction ridges. In this study, several factors were estimated with same fingerprint image using Adobe photoshop CS 6 for analysis: changes of image quality by ISO, movement when photographing, and photographers' experience and skill. Consequently, there was no significant change of image quality by ISO. Furthermore, there was no significant difference in the hand-held images between crime scene investigators and laymen, yet there was significant difference between hand-held images and images using tripod in the aspect of resolution. This study shows that using tripod is very important in forensic fingerprint photography through empirical methods.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information Security & Cryptology
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• v.18 no.3
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• pp.61-68
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• 2008

In this paper, we propose a new method to assess fingerprint image quality. In the proposed method, analysis of local variance of image's gray values, local orientation, minutiae density, size and position is applied. Especially by using position information of inputted fingerprint images, partial fingerprint images are filtered and recognition performance is improved. In the experimental results, quality threshold value for improving performance can be decided by analysis of correlation between image quality and recognition rate.

• The Transactions of The Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers
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• v.58 no.12
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• pp.2529-2531
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• 2009

A simple multimodal fingerprint recognition method based on two types of feature vectors such as minutiae points and directional features is proposed, where Directional Filter Bank (DFB) is used to extract directional features. Experimental results show that the proposed method can effectively combine minutiae- and DFB-based methods and produce a better matching capability in the poor quality fingerprint image.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information Security & Cryptology
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• v.20 no.3
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• pp.23-30
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• 2010

Compression techniques can be applied to large-scale fingerprint systems to store or transmit fingerprint data efficiently. In this paper, we investigate the effects of FBI WSQ fingerprint image compression on the performance of a fingerprint verification system using multiple linear regressions. We propose a maximum compression using fingerprint image quality score. Based on the experiments, we can confirm that the proposed approach can compress the fingerprint images up to 3 times more than the fixed compression ratio without significant degradation of the verification accuracy.