Correlation-based fingerprint matching using FPGAs

Correlation based methods are gaining attention in the biometric field due to the extremely good results achieved for pattern matching recognition in authentication and verification processes. In particular, a high matching accuracy can be obtained with these methods in the fingerprint field. However, they cannot be used in many applications because of the large computational effort required. On the other hand, they are very well suited for FPGA implementations. In this work we present efficient architectures for implementation of zero mean normalized cross correlation using Virtex-4 FPGAs for application to correlation based fingerprint matching. In particular, we compare the implementations of correlation in the spatial and Fourier domains. Experimental results demonstrate that FPGAs allow improving performance by at least two orders of magnitude with respect to software implementations in a modern personal computer. Thanks to this speedup, correlation based algorithms for fingerprint matching achieve acceptable performance for real-time processing