Fingerprint recognition plays an important role in many commercial applications and is used by millions of people every day, e.g. for unlocking mobile phones. Fingerprint image segmentation is typically the first processing step of most fingerprint algorithms and it divides an image into foreground, the region of interest, and background. Two types of error can occur during this step which both have a negative impact on the recognition performance: ‘true’ foreground can be labeled as background and features like minutiae can be lost, or conversely ‘true’ background can be misclassified as foreground and spurious features can be introduced. The contribution of this paper is threefold: firstly, we propose a novel factorized directional bandpass (FDB) segmentation method for texture extraction based on the directional Hilbert transform of a Butterworth bandpass (DHBB) filter interwoven with soft-thresholding. Secondly, we provide a manually marked ground truth segmentation for 10560 images as an evaluation benchmark. Thirdly, we conduct a systematic performance comparison between the FDB method and four of the most often cited fingerprint segmentation algorithms showing that the FDB segmentation method clearly outperforms these four widely used methods. The benchmark and the implementation of the FDB method are made publicly available.

We consider the task of image decomposition, and we introduce a new model coined directional global three-part decomposition (DG3PD) for solving it. As key ingredients of the DG3PD model, we introduce a discrete multi-directional total variation norm and a discrete multi-directional G-norm. Using these novel norms, the proposed discrete DG3PD model can decompose an image into two or three parts. Existing models for image decomposition Advantages of the DG3PD model over existing ones lie in the properties enforced on the cartoon and texture images. The geometric objects in the cartoon image have a very smooth surface and sharp edges. The texture image yields oscillating patterns on a defined scale which are both smooth and sparse. Moreover, the DG3PD method achieves the goal of perfect reconstruction by summation of all components better than the other considered methods. Relevant applications of DG3PD are a novel way of image compression as well as feature extraction for applications such as latent fingerprint processing and optical character recognition.

Verifying an identity claim by fingerprint recognition is a commonplace experience for millions of people in their daily life, e.g. for unlocking a tablet computer or smartphone. The first processing step after fingerprint image acquisition is segmentation, i.e. dividing a fingerprint image into a foreground region which contains the relevant features for the comparison algorithm, and a background region. We propose a novel segmentation method by global three-part decomposition (G3PD). Based on global variational analysis, the G3PD method decomposes a fingerprint image into cartoon, texture and noise parts. After decomposition, the foreground region is obtained from the non-zero coefficients in the texture image using morphological processing. The segmentation performance of the G3PD method is compared to five state-of-the-art methods on a benchmark which comprises manually marked ground truth segmentation for 10560 images. Performance evaluations show that the G3PD method consistently outperforms existing methods in terms of segmentation accuracy.

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