EURASIP Journal on Applied Signal Processing 
Volume 2004 (2004), Issue 4, Pages 480-494
doi:10.1155/S1110865704309194

Segmentation of Fingerprint Images Using Linear Classifier

Xinjian Chen, Jie Tian, Jiangang Cheng, and Xin Yang

Intelligent Bioinformatics Systems Division, Institute of Automation, The Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100080, China

Received 28 October 2002; Revised 11 September 2003

Abstract

An algorithm for the segmentation of fingerprints and a criterion for evaluating the block feature are presented. The segmentation uses three block features: the block clusters degree, the block mean information, and the block variance. An optimal linear classifier has been trained for the classification per block and the criteria of minimal number of misclassified samples are used. Morphology has been applied as postprocessing to reduce the number of classification errors. The algorithm is tested on FVC2002 database, only 2.45% of the blocks are misclassified, while the postprocessing further reduces this ratio. Experiments have shown that the proposed segmentation method performs very well in rejecting false fingerprint features from the noisy background.