Measurement of Fingerprint Image Quality using Hybrid Segmentation method

The purpose of this paper is to present a new measure for fingerprint image quality assessment that has a considerable effect on evaluation of fingerprint databases. This paper introduces a hybrid segmentation method for measuring an image quality and evaluates the experimental results using various fingerprint databases. This study compares the performance of the proposed hybrid segmentation using variance and coherence of fingerprints against the NIST's NFIQ program. Although NFIQ is a most widely used tool, it classifies the image quality into 5 levels. However, the proposed hybrid method is developed to be conformant to the ISO standards and accordant to human visual perception. The experimental results demonstrate that the hybrid method is able to produce finer quality measures.