Pipelined Orientation Estimation in Fingerprint Images

Fingerprint verification is an important biometric technique for personal identification. Most of the automatic verification systems are based on matching of fingerprint minutiae. Extraction of minutiae is an essential process which requires estimation of orientation of the lines in an image. Most of the existing methods involve intense mathematical computations and hence are performed through software means. In this paper a hardware scheme is presented which is based on a pipelined architecture in order to perform realtime orientation estimation. Synthesized circuits proved the functionality and accuracy of the suggested method.