Abstract: Fingerprint segmentation is an important step in fingerprint recognition and is usually aimed to identify non-ridge regions and unrecoverable low quality ridge regions and exclude them as background so as to reduce the time expenditure of image processing and avoid detecting false features. In high and in low quality ridge regions, often are some remaining ridges which are the afterimages of the previously scanned finger and are expected to be excluded from the foreground. However, existing segmentation methods generally do not take the case into consideration, and often, the remaining ridge regions are falsely classified as foreground by segmentation algorithm with spurious features produced erroneously including unrecoverable regions as foreground. This paper proposes two steps for fingerprint segmentation aimed at removing the remaining ridge region from the foreground. The non-ridge regions and unrecoverable low quality ridge regions are removed as background in the first step, and then the foreground produced by the first step is further analyzed for possible remove of the remaining ridge region. The proposed method proved effective in avoiding detecting false ridges and in improving minutiae detection.

Key words: Fingerprint segmentation, Recoverable ridges, Remaining ridges

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