Approaching Fingerprint Image Enhancement through Reconfigurable Hardware Accelerators

In this paper, an efficient hardware-software architecture is proposed to cope with the implementation of an automatic fingerprint recognition system. A flexible field programmable gate array (FPGA) device lets develop the image processing application so that the same logic substrate is reconfigured and reused by several custom coprocessors during the different operation stages of the sequential biometric algorithm. The results reached with this technology reveal that a middle-range reconfigurable FPGA faces both real-time and parallel compute-intensive demands of the fingerprint image enhancement process.