  Gabor filters play an important role in many application areas for the
enhancement of various types of images and the extraction of Gabor features.
For the purpose of enhancing curved structures in noisy images, we introduce
curved Gabor filters which locally adapt their shape to the direction of flow.
These curved Gabor filters enable the choice of filter parameters which
increase the smoothing power without creating artifacts in the enhanced image.
In this paper, curved Gabor filters are applied to the curved ridge and valley
structure of low-quality fingerprint images. First, we combine two orientation
field estimation methods in order to obtain a more robust estimation for very
noisy images. Next, curved regions are constructed by following the respective
local orientation and they are used for estimating the local ridge frequency.
Lastly, curved Gabor filters are defined based on curved regions and they are
applied for the enhancement of low-quality fingerprint images. Experimental
results on the FVC2004 databases show improvements of this approach in
comparison to state-of-the-art enhancement methods.
