Flexible Hardware for Fingerprint Image Processing

Reconfigurable computing adds to the traditional hardware/software design flow a new degree of freedom in the development of electronic systems. In a system-on-chip platform, the fact that a MCU makes evolve at run-time a hardware coprocessor mapped on a FPGA, to execute thus different compute-intensive tasks in the same silicon-area, results in a clear earned value applied to the system implementation: the low-cost reached through the resources time-multiplexing. Under that approach, this work merges both reconfigurable computing and HW/SW co-design technologies to develop an efficient architecture of an automatic fingerprint authentication system (AFAS) oriented to real-time embedded applications.