Performance analysis of latent fingerprint enhancement techniques

Fingerprint Enhancement is an important step used to improve the accuracy and rate of automated detection of fingerprints. Enhancing the latent fingerprints facilitates the extraction of minutiae from the fingerprint image. In this paper, two methods of latent fingerprint enhancement are carried out. The first uses Histogram Equalization for enhancing the latent fingerprint. The second method uses a novel approach of Binarization followed by Wiener filtering and an additional Median filter. The improvements in the image are then analyzed based on their entropy, contrast and moment.