Hardware-Software Codesign of a Fingerprint Identification Algorithm

摘要

Automatic Fingerprint Authentication Systems are rapidly being incorporated in a wide range of applications, satisfying the society demand of accurate identification frameworks in order to prevent unauthorised accesses or fraudulent uses. Most of biometrics based personal identification systems run on high-performance computer based platforms, which execute a set of complex algorithms implemented in software. Those solutions cannot be applied to small, low-cost and low-power embedded systems, based on microprocessors without floating-point arithmetic unit. In this article we present a hardware/software implementation of a fingerprint minutiae extraction algorithm. The proposed system consists of a microprocessor and a coprocessor implemented in an associated FPGA. In order to develop an efficient implementation, fixed-point computations have substituted the floating-point ones. Due to the low feature requirements the whole system is suitable for a SoC with embedded flexible hardware.