Hardware-Software Codesign of a Fingerprint Alignment Processor

Within the biometrics field, the development of an automatic personal authentication system is nowadays an open research problem. Most of the difficulties rely on the complexity and the computational power needed to implement an algorithm reliable enough to guarantee the validity of the recognition system even when only low-quality biometric information is available from the users. Apart from the inherent complexity of the biometric algorithm, there exist many additional requirements for the application: high-security level, real-time characteristics and low-cost. All these factors originate a technical challenge. A compromise between the final application performance and the amount of resources needed to implement the system exists. Following this direction, the design of a fingerprint alignment processor developed by means of hardware-software codesign techniques is presented in this paper. The performance achieved with this processor is compared against the performance reached with an only software-oriented solution. The acceleration factor achieved by the hardware proves the feasibility of real-time applications, which is not guaranteed when developing the same algorithm under purely-software platforms.