Fingerprint segmentation is an important step in fingerprint identification processing. For effective fingerprint segmentation

the properties of the imaginary of Gabor Filter are analyzed and introduced into the fingerprint segmentation processing as a new feature of the fingerprint area. By using this new feature and other two assistance features

namely the local mean value and the local variance

good segmentation results are gotten with the weighted average segmentation method

which shows the result of the imaginary of Gabor Filter is an effective feature of fingerprint images. In order to get a faster algorithm

the Gabor filter algorithm is also accelerated in special conditions

which reduces the complexity of the proposed algorithm efficiently.