FPGA-based embedded system implementation of finger vein biometrics

With the ubiquitous deployment and rapid growth of electronic information systems in today´s society, personal or identity verification is now a critical key problem. Due to this fact, biometric authentication has emergently gaining popularity as it provides a high security and reliable approach for personal authentication. However, authentication using ones biometric features has not been widely implemented in a real time embedded system. Thus, in this paper, a novel approach to personal verification using infrared finger vein biometric authentication implemented on FPGA-based embedded system is presented. Creating a biometric authentication system in this resource-constrained embedded system for a real-time application, being a challenging problem in itself, is a significant contribution of this work. The proposed biometric system consists of four modules, namely image acquisition, image pre-processing, feature extraction, and matching. Feature extraction is based on minutiae extracted from the vein pattern image, while the biometric matching utilizes a technique based on the Modified Hausdorff Distance. The system is prototyped on Altera Stratix II FPGA hardware board with Nios2-Linux Real Time Operating System running at 100 MHz clock rate. Experiments conducted on a database of 100 images from 20 different hands shows encouraging results with system acceptable accuracy of less than 1.004%. Our first version of the embedded system, which is wholly in firmware, resulted in an execution time of 1953×10⁶ clock cycles or 19 seconds. The results demonstrate that our approach is valid and effective for vein-pattern biometric authentication.