Abstract: Suspect fingerprint images acquired from criminal scenes are often of low quality, or incomplete. The existing algorithms/methods found in literature are not suitable for enhancing these fingerprint images, because these algorithms/methods only perform enhancement once. In this paper, a new method for fingerprint image enhancement was proposed. The proposed method enhanced fingerprint image in Fourier domain and spatial domain by using iterative and wavelet fusion technique. Experimental results indicate that the proposed method significantly improves the performance of fingerprint enhancement — not only was the ridge definition enhanced, but also the ridge fracture was connected and the incompleteness was mended. Therefore, the proposed method is suitable for enhancing low quality fingerprint images.

Key words: fingerprint image enhancement, wavelet image fusion, iterative, ridge connection, fingerprint image mending

摘要： 从刑事现场采集的嫌疑人的指纹图像常是低质量的、残缺的，针对现有方法只做一次增强或不适合增强这类指纹图像，提出了指纹图像融合迭代增强方法。该方法分别在频域和空域两次增强，并采用小波图像融合技术进行迭代增强，有效地提高了脊线的清晰度，接续了脊线的断裂，修补了脊线的残缺。实验结果表明，该算法具有良好的指纹图像增强效果，适合增强低质量的指纹图像。

关键词: 指纹图像增强, 小波图像融合, 迭代, 脊线连接, 指纹图像修补