Automatic Overlapped Fingerprint Separation

Fingerprint images generally contain either a single fingerprint (e.g., rolled images) or a set of non overlapped fingerprints (e.g., slap fingerprints). Overlapped fingerprints constitute a serious challenge to existing fingerprint recognition algorithms. In this paper, relaxation labeling algorithm is proposed to separate overlapped fingerprints into separate fingerprints. The authors first estimate the orientation field of the given image with overlapped fingerprints using Local Fourier Transform. The relaxation labeling algorithm separate overlapped fingerprints without manual marking and singularity point information.