Abstract: The present invention relates to a method to segment slap images and to generate accurately labelled individual fingerprints, said method comprising the following steps: reception of inputs images from a contactless fingerprint reader under controlled lighting conditions; computation of a variance in the received images to estimate a slap area as a foreground slap mask in the input images; identification of individual fingers by finding boundary of each finger; verification of a number of fingers and of geometric constraints; calculation of pose and orientation based on shape and geometry information; identification of effective fingertip area on each detected finger according the pose, orientation, as well as geometric information; output of individual fingerprints.