FPGA-based acceleration of fingerprint minutiae matching

Nowadays fingerprint is the most widely used and studied biometric technique because of its universality, distinctiveness, and decreasing cost of the sensing devices. Among the fingerprint identification techniques, minutiae-based algorithms are the most mature. However, these methods are computationally expensive, particularly for comparison with large databases. This work is devoted to study the performance gains that can be achieved with the use of FPGAs. To this purpose, two minutia-based fingerprint matching algorithms have been selected and implemented in a FPGA in order to compare the requirements and performance of software and hardware implementations. Experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of implementing fingerprint matching algorithms in current FPGA devices achieving speed-ups of one or two orders of magnitude. Customization of the proposed implementations can lead to several architectures optimized in size, price, speed or accuracy.