Paper Title
A Modified Thinning Algorithm For Minutiae Feature Extraction Of Fingerprint Images On FPGA

Abstract
Critical and indispensable step in biometric fingerprint image processing is thinning. The speed and reliability of thinning process are more important for the fingerprint. In this paper a fast fingerprint thinning algorithm is introduced. We have modified the thinning algorithm which was proposed by Saleh, Eldin and Wadah [1].The unique feature of our modified algorithm that directly works on gray scale images after normalization process not the binarized one where binarization of fingerprint causes many spurious minutiae and removes some important features and algorithm makes use of parallel processing of each individual image segments of size 8×8 pixels to speed up the execution without segmentation and ridge extraction. This paper presents the implementation of algorithm on Spartan- 3E XC3S100E FPGA as an appropriate solution for portable devices and for low-cost consumer market. Experimental results shows thinning of fingerprint image are obtained in 321ms when an image of 256×256 pixel is analyzed. Keywords- Biometrics, Fingerprint Identification, Image Processing.