A Comparative Performance Analysis of JPEG 2000 vs. WSQ for Fingerprint Image Compression

The FBI Wavelet Scalar Quantization (WSQ) compression standard was developed by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). The main advantage of WSQ-based fingerprint image compression has been its superiority in preserving the fingerprint minutiae features even at very high compression rates which standard JPEG compression techniques were unable to preserve. With the advent of JPEG 2000 image compression technique based on Wavelet transforms moving away from DCT-based methods, we have been motivated to investigate if the same advantage still persists. In this paper, we describe a set of experiments we carried out to compare the performance of WSQ with JPEG 2000. The performance analysis is based on three public databases of fingerprint images acquired using different imaging sensors. Our analysis shows that JPEG 2000 provides better compression with less impact on the overall system accuracy performance.