Advance Approach to Estimate Fingerprint Images Quality Using

Statistical & Graphical Methodology

College of Electrical and Mechanical Engineering

National University of Sciences and Technology

Rawalpindi, Pakistan
1
saadia.afzal@gmail.com, 2Kshoab@yahoo.com, 3aliafzalawan@yahoo.com

Authors: Saadia Afzal Rana1, Shoab A Khan2, Ali Afzal Awan3

Abstract applications. A minutia matching is soul of identification

Quality of fingerprint image is the predicator of Automatic process. Noise & deformation adversely effect minutiae-
Fingerprint Identification Systems (AFIS) performance before the based approach.
matching algorithm is applied. This means good quality images
will boost the overall performance of matcher and vice versa.
This paper presents the novel methodology for fingerprint quality Quality of fingerprint responds to efficient & accurate
estimation. We purpose a methodology based on statistical and detection of minutiae. There are two main drawbacks of
graphical assessment of images in order to classify it in one of bad quality fingerprint image which are (1) Ignorance of
three classes i.e. Dry, Wet & Normal. Statistical assessment is in genuine minutiae (2) Creation of spurious minutiae[2].
on the basis of global & local features whereas Graphical Instead of passing acquired image through verification
assessment is dependent on global features. For global assessment process, it is optimum approach to estimate image quality
we are dependent on Limited Ring-Wedge Spectral Energy
technique. Although global features extraction effectively and then do preprocessing if required before initiating
indicates the clear layout of alternating ridge and valley pattern verification [2].
,however it is failed to classify good quality images containing
few low quality blocks. Local features are dependent on We have classified image in to following three categories
measurement of Mean ,Standard Deviation ,Variance , Dry on the basis of quality
Percentage, Humidity Percentage ,Background Pixel Percentage
,Foreground Pixel Percentage ,Quality Index ,Mean to Standard
Deviation Ratio ,Average Gray Level to Variance Ratio,
Uniformity ,Smoothness ,In-homogeneity of image. Our image
quality estimatator is implemented in MATLAB and has been
tested on Database DB1 of FVC 2002.Results from experiments
clearly depict the effectiveness of our proposal.

Keywords
Automatic Fingerprint Identification Systems (AFIS),
Image Quality estimation, Quality Index, Statistical
Analysis, Image Humidity, Image Dryness. Fig. 1: Example of finger print images

Introduction Our purposed system’s overview is shown in figure below.

Quality of fingerprint means how well the ridge structure is
clearly visible in image. Attributes for good quality
fingerprint image are (1) high contrast (2) well defined
ridges and valleys. Whereas ‘bad’ quality fingerprint image
is characterized by (1) low contrast (2) ill defined
boundaries between ridges and valleys[1]. Following
factors leads to degraded quality fingerprint image.

1. Ridge discontinuity due to presence of crease, wounds

or bruises.
2. Fused ridges & smudged marks due to sweating factor
or unclean skin surface or heavy pressure.
3. Image having low contrast & fragmented ridges are due
to excessively dry fingers or slight pressure. [1]

Unchangeably & uniqueness are one of the important

factors that have been widely accepted as one of the forms
of Individual’s identification especially in criminal Fig. 2: Purposed system’s overview
investigation, access control & internet authentication
Prior Related Work following features are used to grasp statistical
Ratha & Bolle ‘s approach [3] for estimation of image characteristics of image.
quality in wavelet domain is optimal choice for WSQ
compressed fingerprint images , but it is not desirable Table 1: Features for statistical characteristics
methodology for uncompressed fingerprint images since Feature Description
the wavelet transformation consume much computation. Mean[9] Mean of gray values of input image.
Hong andet.al. [4] proposed a method to assess the quality
of a fingerprint image by measuring the variance of gray
levels. Gray level intensity is computed in a direction
orthogonal to the orientation field for each block. The Standard Measure of statistical dispersion of gray level
variance is then compared with threshold to estimate Deviation intensity if the center of the data is measured
quality of fingerprint. The only drawback of this [9] about the mean.
methodology is that it doesn’t take in account the ridge
frequency. For noisy image, this approach will lead to
complex computation. Shen et al. [5] computed a output of
bank of Gabor filter for each block & compare the standard Variance[9] Variance of gray values. It is square of Standard
deviation of all global response with predetermined Deviation .
threshold to determine fingerprint image quality.Hong et
al. [6] use sinusoidal wave model to classify blocks into
unrecoverable & recoverable regions.Tulyakov & Dry Need to measure the dry percentage of image’s
Govindaraju [7] proposed a limited ring-wedge spectral Percentage foreground by counting the number of dry
measure to estimate the fingerprint global features. They blocks.
use in-homogeneity & directional contrast to estimate the Dry percentage = (100 * Number of dry
fingerprint local features. Bolle et. Al [8] marked each blocks ) / Total number of blocks
block of image as directional or non-directional by Humidity Need to measure the humidity percentage of
searching large image gradient in some predefined Percentage image’s foreground .
Humidity percentage = (100 * Number of
direction. E.Lim , K.Toh ,P.N.Suganthan, X.Jiang & W.Yau oily blocks ) / Total number of blocks
[9] purposed a method that extract local features from sub- Background After segmentation, this value has effect on dry
block of fingerprint image based on directional strength Pixel & humid percentage.
,sinusoidal local ridge/valley pattern, ridge/valley Percentage
uniformity & core occurrence. Then pattern classification Foreground Difference of total image size & background
is used to assign different quality level to each sub-block. Pixel size gives this value.
Percentage
Quality Two Cumulative Factors control the value of
The Purposed Method Index quality index.
We have characterized input fingerprint image in to three k1=0.01 , k2=0.03
broad categories i.e. Normal, Dry & Wet Image. The Cumulative Factor 1= (k1* Max Gray Level
quality classification features for each category are as such in Image)2
Cumulative Factor 1= (k2* Max Gray Level
1. Normal Image: Clear ridge/valley contrast, fair amount in Image)2
Index 1=(2 * Global Mean of image +
of minutiae & easily-detected ridges [10]
Cumulative Factor 1) / (Global Mean of
2. Dry Image: Broken Ridges, abundant white pixels in image 2 + Cumulative Factor 1)
the ridges therefore only small part of ridges can be Index 2=(2 * Global Variance of image +
separated.[10] Cumulative Factor 2) / (Global
3. Oily Image: On whole there are well-separated ridges Variance of image 2 + Cumulative Factor 2)
but some portion of valley is filled up with dark/black Quality Index=absolute(index 1*index 2)
pixels because of which ridges appear to be thick.[10] Mean to Ratio of mean and standard deviation
Standard
Deviation
Fingerprint image has an alternating pattern of ridges and Ratio
valleys. Therefore numerical as well as graphical values Average Gray Level values are averaged for foreground
can be predicted for each category before hand. Local Gray Level part of image and then analyzed along with
features of input image are extracted using ‘Statistical to Variance variance of gray level
Measures’, whereas ‘Graphical Representation’ is used as Ratio
mean to extract global features. Uniformity Analyze the uniformity of gray level through
[11] out foreground of image
A. Statistical Measure
It measure the statistics of image using global & local
features. Where L, and h(I) represent the number of
A1 Local Statistical Measure possible gray level intensities and the histogram
Statistical measures are carried out to get numerical figures of the intensity levels.
about the distribution of different intensities of gray level Smoothness Smoothes the gray level in input using the
at different location throughout the image. In this paper [12] Exponential method, heavily dependent on
 alpha whose value is :-
In- In-homogeneity is used to quantify the local
homogeneity texture of image by taking the ratio of
[11] following local features of image
(Mean * Uniformity )/ (Standard
Deviation * Smoothness)
A2 Global Statistical Measure -Limited Ring-Wedge
Spectral Energy
Global measure corresponds to the spectral measure of
textured, based on fourier spectrum, which is ideally suited
for describing the directionality of periodic or almost
periodic 2-D patterns in an image. Spectral texture is useful
for discriminating between periodic and non-periodic
texture patterns and ,further , for quantifying differences
between periodic patterns [14].
Expressing spectrum in polar coordinates to yield a
function S(r, θ) ,simplified the interpretation of spectrum
features. In function S(r, θ) , S is the spectrum function
and r and θ are the variables in this coordination system.
S(r, θ) for each direction θ , S(r, θ) will be considered as
1-D function , S θ (r ) .And same is case for each frequency
r ,Sr(θ) is a 1-D function .Analyzing Sθ(r) for a fixed value
of θ yields the behavior of the spectrum (i.e presence of
peaks) along a radial direction from the origin ,whereas
analyzing Sr(θ) for a fixed value of r yields the behavior
along a circle centered on the origin [14].
A global descriptor is obtained by integrating these
functions [14]:
 
and
 
Where R0 is the radius of circle centered on origin.
Fig. 3: Spectra and the limit ring-wedge for normal image
Fig. 4: Spectra and the limit ring-wedge for dry image
Fig. 5: Spectra and the limit ring-wedge for oily image
Figures 3,4 and 5 shows the spectra for one pair of
fingerprint images (having normal/good , dry and oily
quality) from the same finger. Band energy is limited to be
computed between frequency 30 to 60 as characteristic
principal peak is around frequency 40. That’s why it is
known as “limited ring wedge spectral measure” [11].
The difference between normal , dry and oily quality image
is significant as indicated by strong peak & major energy
distribution [11].
Global features is effective to indicate the layout of
alternating periodic ridge and valley pattern .But this
technique is not able to indicate the existence of few bad
blocks(oily/dry) in normal quality image. For that we have
to be dependent on local features in combination with
global features. Logically first global features are analyzed
and then local features are measured.
B. Graphical Representation
Graphical Representation is a mean to depict different
aspects of input image by having contrasting plotting for
each category. Following characteristics have been
considered for graphical analysis.
Table 2: Features for graphical analysis of fingerprint
Feature Description
Entropy [13] Entropy is a statistical measure of randomness
that can be used to characterize the texture of
the input fingerprint image & formularize as
-sum(p.*log(p))
Where p contains the histogram counts
1) For normal image it is evenly
distributed through out the scale.
2) For oily image it is diverted more
 towards maximum energy Fig. 6: Flow chart of classification’s algorithm
3) For Dry image it is unevenly
distributed on energy scale Experimental Results
Uniformity Measures uniformity by counting the number of The purposed method is verified with gray-scaled DB1 of
pixels for each gray level. FVC 2002 which consists of 800 fingerprint images (image
1) For normal image we found size 388 X 374) from 100 fingers. Each finger has eight
uniformly increasing trend in impressions.
graph for intensity levels.
2) For oily image the increasing Database is mixture of normal, oily and dry images. The
trend is not uniform. purposed methodology has been implemented and tested in
3) For Dry image it is unevenly MATLAB 7.0. Out of 800 images, 645 are clustered as
distributed. ‘Normal’, 13 are tagged as ‘Oily’, 141 images are
Smoothness Plot the smoothness of fingerprint image. classified as ‘Dry’ and only single is filtered out as
Spectral Perform Discrete Fast Fourier Transform on ‘Mixture of Oily and Dry’ features. We found this
Analysis image.
methodology 100% accurate and effective. It took less than
PCA- Latent PCA operates on image and returns the
[13] principal component coefficients, also known second to estimate the quality.
as loadings. Latent is a vector containing the
Eigen values of the covariance matrix of input A. Statistical Measure
image. ‘Statistical measure’ in parallel assists the ‘graphical
PCA- TSquare is coefficient which contains representation’ in order to validate the purposed
TSquare Hotelling's statistic for each pixel in image. methodology. Global features categorize image as dry, oily
[13]
PCA-Score The principal component scores is the
and normal quality . In order to further identify the bad
[13] representation of image in the principal blocks in good quality image we carried out local feature
component space. extraction, for which we have set threshold for statistical
Rows of Score correspond to observations, attributes. If humidity percentage is greater than 11 then
columns to components. image would be marked as humid. Similarly if dryness
percentage is greater than 14 then image will be tagged as
dry. Foreground and background percentage not only
C. Classification Algorithm effect the block processing speed but also has impact on
Classifier is the core of Fingerprint quality estimator. The threshold values for each case. Variance, Standard
working of classifier is shown in flow graph given below Deviation, Mean and Average gray level vary slightly for
images that clusters in same quality class but the same
Start parameters vary remarkably for images that belong to same
class. The success factor behind this fact is ‘Segmentation’
Acquire Input Image of foreground and background portion. The terminologies
like uniformity, smoothness and In-homogeneity behaves
Segment foreground &
as expected.
background and compute
percentage for each area
Major indicators in Statistical Measure are Dryness and
Humidity Percentage. Mean, Variance, Standard Deviation,
Compute and Analyze global
Compute ,plot & analyze the
smoothness , uniformity
statistical measure of image Average gray level and their respective ratio for same class
,entropy & PCA of image of image varies with the intensity level in image. Quality
For each block compute mean , Index is also one of classifier component. For Normal
standard deviation , dryness ,
humidity , average gray level , quality
quality image its value lies between 5-6, for oily image it
index , variance ,uniformity
,smoothness & in-homogeneity
decrease down between 3-3.5 but for dry image it is in
range for 8-9.

B. Graphical Representation
Compute Humidity and Dry
Percentage ‘Graphical Representation’ provides visual assistance to
classify an image. It is justified to explain each feature
graphically. The order of images for each of graphical
Compare humidity & dryness percentage along with
other attribute with pre-defined threshold value for features is Normal, Oily and Dry.
each attribute while keeping in view the foreground
percentage of image

Classify image on
basis of statistical &
graphical measure

End
Fig. 7: Uniformity & spectral analysis for three classes of
image

Fig. 9: Entropy & smoothness plotting for three classes of

image

Conclusion
The performance of Automatic Fingerprint Identification
Systems is critically dependent on the quality of input
fingerprint image. Good quality images enhance system’s
performance to be more robust and vice versa. However
unfortunate we can’t deny the fact that it is impossible to
always capture ‘optimal’ quality images. To overcome this
problem image enhancement is carried out. It is not logical
to apply enhancement on every input image as its wastage
of effort for normal /good quality images and time
consuming as well .Most of enhancement algorithm are
applied without taking in account the quality of image. But
studies have proved that different enhancement techniques
are required for dry and oily images as in oily image we
have to highlight valley and in dry image focus is towards
ridge enhancement.

In this paper we have purposed a novel method that

estimate the quality of fingerprint image by taking in
account the statistical as well as graphical measures. Most
of already existing technologies for said purpose relies on
complex mathematical model that requires much
knowledge in mathematics.

Future Work
It is planned that we will further improve the performance
Fig. 8: PCA components analysis for three classes of of our system by categorizing image in to six categories
image that are Good , Normal ,Dry , Oily, Mixture of Dry & Oily
and Distorted Image. Enhancement or restoration
operations are applied according to category.

Another goal in mind is to partition database on the basis

of ridge pattern as arch, tented arch, left loop, right loop &
whorl. This will ultimately reduce matching time
especially for large databases.
 
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