Design and Implementation of an FPGA-Based Real-Time Face Recognition System

Face recognition systems play a vital role in many applications including surveillance, biometrics and security. In this work, we present a complete real-time face recognition system consisting of a face detection, a recognition and a downsampling module using an FPGA. Our system provides an end-to-end solution for face recognition; it receives video input from a camera, detects the locations of the face(s) using the Viola-Jones algorithm, subsequently recognizes each face using the Eigenface algorithm, and outputs the results to a display. Experimental results show that our complete face recognition system operates at 45 frames per second on a Virtex-5 FPGA.