Image enhancement and thinning are very important pre-processing steps of biometric fingerprint recognition system. This reduction is accomplished by two preprocessing steps. The overall performance of the fingerprint recognition system is highly depended on image enhancement phase of recognition process. The image enhancement is a very important phase in fingerprint recognition for improving the image quality by removing the noise, connecting broken ridges and making smooth image. Then after obtaining the skeleton of the image using skeletonization is known as thinning. The enhanced image will be thinned and all ridges will be coming 1 pixel breadth. The performance of the fingerprint minutiae extraction is highly depending on the thinning process of the enhanced image. Thus, the overall performance of the fingerprint recognition system is highly affected by the image enhancement and the image thinning phase of recognition process. It is the precondition of minutiae extraction. In this paper, Image enhancement of fingerprint image is done using Gaussian Mask and Sobel Convolution and then after we propose to apply a Zhang - Suen Thinning algorithm on fingerprint image for better performance. This will give efficient results in terms of image quality and thinning speed. The implementation of research work is done in .Net platform using custom fingerprint database of 100 images of 25 users.

Fingerprint Recognition, Fingerprint Image Enhancement, Fingerprint Image Thinning, Skeletonization

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