SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR DETERMINING THE QUALITY OF FINGERPRINT IMAGES

A fingerprint image is divided into blocks of pixels. The blocks are marked as directional or non-directional. The blocks are also determined to be within the foreground or background of the image. Contiguous regions of blocks that are in the foreground and are directional are selected. The quality measure is the ratio of the area of all these selected contiguous regions to the total area of the fingerprint image (i.e., the foreground.) The contribution of each of the blocks of the regions to the quality measure can be given by a distance from a block containing a reference point (a block of reference) within the foreground. Further, the block of reference can be located at the centroid of the foreground. Images are judged to be of poor quality if the quality measure is below a quality threshold and are judged to be of good quality if the quality measure is above the quality threshold. Optionally, poor quality images are examined further to determine if they are smudged or come from a dry finger. Good quality images are further processed to determine if they are partial or entire images of the fingerprint.