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FINGERPRINT IMAGE ENHANCEMENT AND MINUTIAE EXTRACTION NIMITHA CHAMA Dept. of Electrical Computer Engineering Clemson University ABSTRACT Automatic and reliable extraction of minutiae from fingerprint images is a critical step in fingerprint matching. The quality of input fingerprint images plays an important role in the performance of automatic identification and verification algorithms. This report presents a fast fingerprint enhancement and minutiae extraction algorithm (as described in the paper “Fingerprint Image Enhancement: Algorithm and Performance Evaluation” by Lin Hong, Yifei Wan and Anil Jain for image enhancement) which improves the clarity of the ridge and valley structures of the input fingerprint images based on the frequency and orientation of the local ridges and thereby extracting correct minutiae. INTRODUCTION Fingerprint based identification has been one of the most successful biometric techniques used for personal identification. Each individual has unique fingerprints. A fingerprint is the pattern of ridges and valleys on the finger tip. A fingerprint is thus defined by the uniqueness of the local ridge characteristics and their relationships. Minutiae points are these local ridge characteristics that occur either at a ridge ending or a ridge bifurcation. A ridge ending is defined as the point where the ridge ends abruptly and the ridge bifurcation is the point where the ridge splits into two or more branches. Automatic minutiae detection becomes a difficult task in low quality fingerprint images where noise and contrast deficiency result in pixel configurations similar to that of minutiae. This is an important aspect that has been taken into consideration in this project for extraction of the minutiae with a minimum error in a particular location. AN OVERVIEW OF THE METHOD The whole project is divided into the following three steps. 1. Pre-Processing 2. Minutiae extraction