FPGA-based low-cost real-time face recognition

Nowadays face recognition plays a central role in surveillance, biometrics and security. In this paper a Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) based low-cost real-time architecture for face recognition is presented. The face recognition module receives the detected faces from a video stream and processes the data with the widely used Eigenfaces, also known as the Principal Component Analysis (PCA) algorithm. The architecture is implemented on a low-cost Zynq-Z7010 FPGA. The proposed architecture is a part of a system, that capable of finding faces in a crowd based on a preliminarily defined set of faces. In the future it can be integrated into real-time surveillance systems of frequently crowded places (e.g. airports, bus stations), to sort out the supposed sources of threat, and hereby reduce the risk of possible criminal actions.