The fingerprint segmentation is aimed to exclude non-ridge regions and unrecoverable ridge regions and remaining ridges as background. This could improve the fingerprint recognition accuracy and image processing speed. In general

remaining ridges are of clear structure. Which makes it difficult to identify remaining ridges from the interested regions merely by characteristic parameters of fingerprint image. The paper proposes two steps for fingerprint segmentation aiming at removing remaining ridges from background. If the remaining and the real ridge regions are separate to each other

the area parameter is used to remove remaining ridges in the first step

In the case of conglutination

the shape features of the fingerprint image are aiming to find the optimal segmentation point in the second step. The experimental results show that the proposed method leads to adequate accuracy of minutiae detection.