The Division of Overlapped Fingerprint using Speckle Noise Reduction

A fingerprint in its narrow sense is an impression left by the friction ridges of a human finger. The recovery of fingerprints from a crime scene is an important method of science. Normally, fingerprint images contain a single fingerprint or a set of non-overlapped fingerprints. There may be situations where overlapped fingerprint can be obtained. It can be frequently encountered in the latent fingerprint lifted from crime scenes. It is essential to separate those overlapped fingerprint into its component fingerprints. The challenging work in separating overlapped fingerprint is the separation of mixed orientation field into its component orientation field. The region masks are then further used to separate the fingerprint. This paper proposes a novel algorithm that is fully automated in its approach to region masking the overlapped fingerprint image. The algorithm recognizes a unique approach of using blurring, erosion and dilation in order to attain the desired automated region masks. The experiments conducted visually demonstrate the effectiveness of the algorithm.