Estimation of the fingerprint orientation field plays an important role in automatic fingerprint recognition systems. In this paper

a new algorithm for computing the fingerprint orientation field is proposed. The basic idea behind the algorithm is to estimate the local region orientation. We use linear projection analysis and weighted lower order two-dimensional Legendre polynomials in the sine domain. This method helps to accurately extract low quality fingerprint image orientation fields. Experiments on the database of FVC 2000 show that

compared with the previously proposed gradient-based methods

the proposed method is more accurate and more robust against noise

and is able to better estimate fingerprint orientation field of low quality fingerprint image with large noisy areas.