A low-cost fully pipelined architecture for fingerprint matching

Fingerprint matching is a key procedure in fingerprint identification applications. The fingerprint-matching algorithm based on minutiae is one of the most typical algorithms that can achieve a reasonably correct recognition rate. Performance and cost are two critical factors when implementing minutia-based matching algorithms in most embedded applications. A low-cost, fully pipelined architecture for minutia-based fingerprint matching is proposed in this paper. A regular matching unit with a pipeline of 13 stages is designed as the core of the architecture, interfacing with a two-port RAM and a DDR3 controller. We implemented the whole architecture on a Xilinx FPGA board with the Virtex VII XC7VX485T chip. The matching unit can run with a frequency of 330 MHz on the chip, which leads the system to achieve a throughput of about 430000 fingerprints per second when processing typical datasets. The unit only occupies 568 slices, which is less than 1% of the available chip resources. The board only consumes 16 W of power when run. The architecture can gain about twice the throughput of the 2.93 GHz Intel Xeon5670 CPU at a low logic cost and power.