Fingerprint segmentation: an investigation of various techniques and a parameter study of a variance-based method

Abstract

Fingerprint image segmentation plays an important role in any fingerprint image analysis implementation and it should, ideally, be executed during the initial stages of a fingerprint manipulation process. After careful consideration of various fingerprint segmentation approaches, this manuscript focuses on a block-wise method that is based on the gray-level variance of the image. Because the method of interest is subjected to a number of variable parameters, this document then presents a formal study of these parameters, using a carefully chosen set of experiments. This series of experiments is conducted on database Db1 a of the 2002 version of the Fingerprint Verification Competition (FVC2002).