The state-of-the-art fingerprint matching systems achieve high accuracy on good quality fingerprints. However, degraded fingerprints obtained due to poor skin conditions of subjects or fingerprints obtained around a crime scene often have noisy background and poor ridge structure. Such degraded fingerprints pose problem for the existing fingerprint recognition systems. This paper presents a fingerprint restoration model for a poor quality fingerprint that reconstructs a binarized fingerprint image with an improved ridge structure. In particular, we demonstrate the effectiveness of channel refinement in fingerprint restoration. The state-of-the-art channel refinement mechanisms, such as Squeeze and Excitation (SE) block, in general, create SEblock introduce redundancy among channel weights and degrade the performance of fingerprint enhancement models. We present a lightweight attention mechanism
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