Employing pipelined thinning architecture for real-time fingerprint verifier

Thinning is a very important operation in the pre-processing stage of fingerprint recognition. With the availability of fast thinning hardware, real-time image processing applications can be achieved. The authors introduce a detailed hardware architecture design of a thinning processor used in an embedded fingerprint recognition system. The proposed thinning algorithm has a parallel-pipelining structure suited to hardware realisation, which is implemented and verified using FPGA. Equipped with a modification unit array, a designated operating schedule, and an address generator based on systolic counter, this thinning processor is able to perform a thinning operation within 0.07s at 40MHz for a 512×512picture, which is at least 40 times faster than software execution. Consequently, the proposed thinning processor was successfully integrated into a real-time fingerprint recognition system.