A hardware solution for real-time intelligent fingerprint acquisition

Pubblished online.-- Special Issue.-- El pdf del artículo es la versión post-print.The first step in any fingerprint recognition system is the fingerprint acquisition. A well-acquired fingerprint image results in high-resolution accuracy and low computational effort of processing. Hence, it is very useful for the recognition system to evaluate recognition confidence level to request new fingerprint samples if the confidence level is low, and to facilitate recognition process if the confidence level is high. This paper presents a hardware solution to ensure a successful and friendly acquisition of the fingerprint image, which can be incorporated at low cost into an embedded fingerprint recognition system due to its small size and high speed. The solution implements a novel technique based on directional image processing that allows not only the estimation of fingerprint image quality, but also the extraction of useful information (in particular, singular points). The digital architecture of the module is detailed and their features in terms of resource consumption and processing speed are illustrated with implementation results into FPGAs from Xilinx. Performance of the solution has been verified with fingerprints from several standard databases that have been acquired with sensors of different sizes and technologies (optical, capacitive, and thermal sweeping).This work was partially funded by Junta de Andalucía under the Project P08-TIC-03674 (with support from the PO FEDER-FSE de Andalucía 2007–2013), by Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad under the Project TEC2011-24319 (with support fromFEDER), and by the European Community through the MOBY-DIC Project FP7-INFSO-ICT-248858 (http://www.mobydic-project.eu).Peer reviewe