Fingerprint image enhancement is an essential process in automated fingerprint recognition system. The performance of minutiae extraction algorithms and other fingerprint recognition techniques relies on the quality of the input fingerprint images. Degradation occurs in the recognition due to low quality fingerprints. Low quality images leads to the following problems in minutiae extraction: (i) a significant number of spurious minutiae are extracted, (ii) a large number of genuine minutiae are missed, and (iii) large errors in the location of minutia are produced. In order to ensure good performance of the ridge and minutiae extraction algorithms in poor quality fingerprint images, an enhancement algorithm to improve the clarity of the ridge structure is necessary. In this paper, a new enhancement approach combining the coherence diffusion and Gabor filtering technique with blocks overlapping technique is proposed. The diffusion technique enhances the ridge structure and smoothenthe image effectively. Gabor filter removes breaks in ridge structure. The resulting images from both the diffusion and Gabor technique are combined to yield the final enhanced image. This image is used for further processing in the recognition system. The proposed method is tested with images in FVC 2002 database and the performance is analyzed by comparing it with other existing enhancement techniques. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm gives better results for different quality images of FVC 2002 databases compared to the diffusion and Gabor filter methods if used separately.