  Fingerprints have grown to be the most robust and efficient means of
biometric identification. Latent fingerprints are commonly found at crime
scenes. They are also of the overlapped kind making it harder for
identification and thus the separation of overlapped fingerprints has been a
conundrum to surpass. The usage of dedicated software has resulted in a manual
approach to region masking of the two given overlapped fingerprints. The region
masks are then further used to separate the fingerprints. This requires the
user's physical concentration to acquire the separate region masks, which are
found to be time-consuming. This paper proposes a novel algorithm that is fully
automated in its approach to region masking the overlapped fingerprint image.
The algorithm recognizes a unique approach of using blurring, erosion, and
dilation in order to attain the desired automated region masks. The experiments
conducted visually demonstrate the effectiveness of the algorithm.
