Patent ID: 7551757

Claim:
A method for determining a bearing a surface in images of skin prints, the skin having ridges/furrows and the images existing in the form of image data captured by a sensor for acquiring images, characterized in that the image is filtered with a plurality of Gabor filters with different directions of the cosine function in the spatial domain, in that areas are determined from the filter responses which areas are each distinguished by an approximate direction, preset by a particular Gabor filter, of the ridges/furrows, and in that the areas are combined to an overall area corresponding to the bearing surface, characterized in that each of the areas that is distinguished by the approximate direction is determined by outlining a region of particular type pixels by means of an edge-tracing algorithm after the image is filtered with the plurality of Gabor filters, characterized in that, to allow the areas to be determined from the filter responses tile by tile into which the image is divided, a respective variance is derived from each filter response, and in that tiles having a variance that is greater than a preset threshold value are assigned to a particular area, characterized in that the derivation of the variance is performed by deriving the variances for tiles that overlap one another.