| Biometrics such as fingerprint, face and voice print offers means of reliable personal authentication that can address these problems and is gaining citizen and government acceptance.; Reliable extraction of features from poor quality prints is the most challenging problem faced in the area of fingerprint recognition. In this thesis, we introduce a new approach for fingerprint image enhancement based on Short Time Fourier Transform (STFT) Analysis. STFT is a well known time-frequency analysis technique to analyze non-stationary signals. In this thesis, we extend its application to the analysis 2D fingerprint images. The proposed analysis and enhancement algorithm simultaneously estimates several intrinsic properties of the fingerprint such as the foreground region mask, local ridge orientation and local frequency. We also objectively measure the effectiveness of the enhancement algorithm and show that it can improve the sensitivity and recognition accuracy of existing feature extraction and matching algorithms.; We also present a new feature extraction algorithm based on chain code contour processing.; Finally we present a novel minutia based fingerprint recognition algorithm that incorporates three new ideas. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)... |
