A digital circuit for extracting singular points from fingerprint images

Since singular point extraction plays an important role in many fingerprint recognition systems, a digital circuit to implement such processing is presented herein. A novel algorithm that combines hardware efficiency with precision in the extraction of the points has been developed. The circuit architecture contains three main building blocks to carry out the three main stages of the algorithm: extraction of a partitioned directional image, smoothing, and searching for the patterns associated with singular points. The circuit processes the pixels in a serial way, following a pipeline scheme and executing in parallel several operations. The design flow employed has been supported by CAD tools. It starts with high-level descriptions and ends with the hardware prototyping into a FPGA from Xilinx.

[1]  Xiang Ji,et al.  Comparative Analysis of Fingerprint Orientation Field Algorithms , 2009, 2009 Fifth International Conference on Image and Graphics.

[2]  V. S. Srinivasan,et al.  Detection of singular points in fingerprint images , 1992, Pattern Recognit..

[3]  Shi-Jinn Horng,et al.  Embedded Fingerprint Verification System , 2005, 11th International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Systems (ICPADS'05).

[4]  Vincenzo Conti,et al.  A Novel Embedded Fingerprints Authentication System Based on Singularity Points , 2008, 2008 International Conference on Complex, Intelligent and Software Intensive Systems.

[5]  Anil K. Jain,et al.  Handbook of Fingerprint Recognition , 2005, Springer Professional Computing.

[6]  M. Lopez,et al.  Flexible hardware for fingerprint Image Processing , 2007, 2007 Ph.D Research in Microelectronics and Electronics Conference.

[7]  Shahram Mohammadi,et al.  Fingerprint reference point detection using orientation field and curvature measurements , 2009, 2009 IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Computing and Intelligent Systems.

[8]  Takeshi Takahashi,et al.  A New Detection Approach for the Fingerprint Core Location Using Extended Relation Graph , 2005, IEICE Trans. Inf. Syst..

[9]  M.L. Garcia,et al.  FPGA Implementation of a Ridge Extraction Fingerprint Algorithm Based on Microblaze and Hardware Coprocessor , 2006, 2006 International Conference on Field Programmable Logic and Applications.

[10]  Iluminada Baturone,et al.  Fuzzy Models for Fingerprint Description , 2011, WILF.

[11]  Jun Li,et al.  A systematic topological method for fingerprint singular point detection , 2008, 2008 10th International Conference on Control, Automation, Robotics and Vision.

[12]  Akio Tojo,et al.  Fingerprint pattern classification , 1984, Pattern Recognit..

[13]  Mariano Fons,et al.  Acceleration of complex algorithms on a fast reconfigurable embedded system on Spartan-3 , 2009, 2009 International Conference on Field Programmable Logic and Applications.