Unleashing the Power of Simplicity: A Minimalist Strategy for State-of-the-Art Fingerprint Enhancement

Fingerprint recognition systems, which rely on the unique characteristics of human fingerprints, are essential in modern security and verification applications. Accurate minutiae extraction, a critical step in these systems, depends on the quality of fingerprint images. Despite recent improvements in fingerprint enhancement techniques, state-of-the-art methods often struggle with low-quality fingerprints and can be computationally demanding. This paper presents a minimalist approach to fingerprint enhancement, prioritizing simplicity and effectiveness. Two novel methods are introduced: a contextual filtering method and a learning-based method. These techniques consistently outperform complex state-of-the-art methods, producing clearer, more accurate, and less noisy images. The effectiveness of these methods is validated using a challenging latent fingerprint database. The open-source implementation of these techniques not only fosters reproducibility but also encourages further advancements in the field. The findings underscore the importance of simplicity in achieving high-quality fingerprint enhancement and suggest that future research should balance complexity and practical benefits.