Floating-point accelerator for biometric recognition on FPGA embedded systems

This paper aims at presenting a Floating-Point Biometric Accelerator (FPBA) specially designed to speed-up processing kernels used in biometric algorithms. The FPBA was developed in order to facilitate its inclusion as part of an embedded system that was implemented on a low-cost FPGA family from Xilinx. The advantage of this approach is that such algorithms can be programmed on the same hardware architecture following a software design flow. The internal design includes several blocks that compute basic operations and transcendental functions useful in biometrics. For comparison purposes, the execution time of four typical biometric kernels resolved by the FPBA were compared against the floating-point unit (FPU) provided by Xilinx. In all cases, the experimental results show that the FPBA reduces the execution time by a factor ranging from x7 to x22. The results also show the execution of two biometric recognition algorithms that are accelerated by x7 and x16.