Fingerprint image enhancement is a key aspect of an automated fingerprint identification system. This paper describes an effective algorithm based on a novel lighting compensation scheme. The scheme involves the use of adaptive higher-order singular value decomposition on a tensor of wavelet subbands of a fingerprint (AHTWF) image to enhance the quality of the image. The algorithm consists of three stages. The first stage is the decomposition of an input fingerprint image of size 2M × 2N into four subbands at the first level by applying a two-dimensional discrete wavelet transform. In the second stage, we construct a tensor in RM×N×4 space. The tensor contains four wavelet subbands that serve as four frontal planes. Furthermore, the tensor is decomposed through higher-order singular value decomposition to separate the fingerprint’s wavelet subbands into detailed individual components. In the third stage, a compensated image is produced by adaptively obtaining the compensation coefficient for each frontal plane of the tensor-based on the reference Gaussian template. The experimental results indicated that the quality of the AHTWF image was higher than that of the original image. The proposed algorithm not only improves the clarity and continuity of ridge structures but also removes the background and blurred regions of a fingerprint image. Therefore, this algorithm can achieve higher fingerprint classification accuracy than related methods can.

Fingerprints have long been used in automated fingerprint identification or verification systems. Singular points (SPs), namely the core and delta point, are the basic features widely used for fingerprint registration, orientation field estimation, and fingerprint classification. In this study, we propose an adaptive method to detect SPs in a fingerprint image. The algorithm consists of three stages. First, an innovative enhancement method based on singular value decomposition is applied to remove the background of the fingerprint image. Second, a blurring detection and boundary segmentation algorithm based on the innovative image enhancement is proposed to detect the region of impression. Finally, an adaptive method based on wavelet extrema and the Henry system for core point detection is proposed. Experiments conducted using the FVC2002 DB1 and DB2 databases prove that our method can detect SPs reliably.

In video processing, background initialization aims to obtain a scene without foreground objects. Recently, the background initialization problem has attracted the attention of researchers because of its real-world applications, such as video segmentation, computational photography, video surveillance, etc. However, the background initialization problem is still challenging because of the complex variations in illumination, intermittent motion, camera jitter, shadow, etc. This paper proposes a novel and effective background initialization method using singular spectrum analysis. Firstly, we extract the video’s color frames and split them into RGB color channels. Next, RGB color channels of the video are saved as color channel spatio-temporal data. After decomposing the color channel spatio-temporal data by singular spectrum analysis, we obtain the stable and dynamic components using different eigentriple groups. Our study indicates that the stable component contains a background image and the dynamic component includes the foreground image. Finally, the color background image is reconstructed by merging RGB color channel images obtained by reshaping the stable component data. Experimental results on the public scene background initialization databases show that our proposed method achieves a good color background image compared with state-of-the-art methods.