A digital circuit for extracting singular points from fingerprint images

Since singular point extraction plays an important role in many fingerprint recognition systems, a digital circuit to implement such processing is presented herein. A novel algorithm that combines hardware efficiency with precision in the extraction of the points has been developed. The circuit architecture contains three main building blocks to carry out the three main stages of the algorithm: extraction of a partitioned directional image, smoothing, and searching for the patterns associated with singular points. The circuit processes the pixels in a serial way, following a pipeline scheme and executing in parallel several operations. The design flow employed has been supported by CAD tools. It starts with high-level descriptions and ends with the hardware prototyping into a FPGA from Xilinx.