Performance analysis of fingerprint compression using an efficient wavelet transform algorithm

This paper presents a new compression algorithm for fingerprint images. A modified wavelet packet scheme based on a fixed decomposition structure, matched to the statistics of fingerprint images, is used to decorrelate the image pixels. Rather than using Huffman coding directly on the quantized coefficients, a hard thresholding and a rounding scheme are applied to the modified mean-removed coefficients, followed by entropy coding. In addition, the performance of two other wavelet decomposition techniques: OWT and E-BBB, is described. The experiments show that the proposed method requires much less computation time compared to E-BBB with almost the same PSNR. It requires a much less complicated quantization method than the one used in [2] and [1], and results in a higher PSNR.