Improved fingerprint image segmentation using new modified gradient based technique

An important step in fingerprint recognition is the segmentation of the region of interest (ROI). The objective of fingerprint segmentation is to extract the region of interest (ROI) which contains the desired fingerprint impression. Fingerprint image segmentation highly influences the performances of automatic fingerprint identification system (AFIS). We present in this paper, a Modified Gradient Based Method to extract ROI. The distinct feature of our technique is that it gives high accurate segmentation percentage for fingerprint images even in case of low quality fingerprint images. The proposed algorithm is applied on FVC2004 database. Experimental results demonstrate the improved performance of the proposed scheme.