Iris image quality assessment based on FPGA coprocessor

The quality of iris image is a key point to affect the accuracy of iris recognition system. There are four main abnormities of captured iris image: defocus, motion blur, eyelid occlusion and eyelash occlusion. They can be distinguished by comparing different frequency components of the image. This paper describes a technique of using Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) coprocessor to assess the quality of the iris image in a Texas Instrument (TI) Digital Signal Processor (DSP) based Iris Recognition System, by implementing Laplacian Sharpening and 2D-FFT transform on the chip. FPGA has become an extremely cost-effective mean of computing algorithms to improve system performance and enhance the computation capability and flexibility of the iris recognition system based on DSP.