Fingerprint recognition is one of the oldest and most popular biometric technologies and it is used in criminal investigations, civilian, commercial applications, and so on. Fingerprint matching is the process used to determine whether the two sets of fingerprints details come from the same finger or not. This work focuses on feature extraction and minutiae matching stage. There are many matching techniques used for fingerprint recognition systems such as minutiae based matching, pattern based matching, Correlation based matching, and image based matching.
A new method based upon Principal Component Analysis (PCA) for fingerprint enhancement is proposed in this paper. PCA is a useful statistical technique that has found application in fields such as face recognition and image compression, and is a common technique for finding patterns in data of high dimension. In the proposed method image is first decomposed into directional images using decimation free Directional Filter bank DDFB. Then PCA is applied to these directional fingerprint images which gives the PCA filtered images. Which are basically directional images? Then these directional images are reconstructed into one image which is the enhanced one. Simulation results are included illustrating the capability of the proposed method.