Fingerprint enhancement using unsupervised hierarchical feature learning

Mihir Sahasrabudhe, Anoop M. Namboodiri

Abstract: We present an approach for learning low-and high-level fingerprint structures in an unsupervised manner, which we use for enhancement of fingerprint images and estimation of orientation fields, frequency images, and region masks. We incorporate the use of a convolutional deep belief network to learn features from greyscale, clean fingerprint images. We also show that reconstruction performed by the learnt network works as a suitable enhancement of the fingerprint, and hierarchical probabilistic inference is able to estimate overall fingerprint structures as well. Our approach performs better than Gabor-based enhancement and short time Fourier transform-assisted enhancement on images it was trained on. We further use information from the learnt features in first layer, which are short and oriented ridge structures, to extract the orientation field, frequency image, and region mask of input fingerprints.