Real Time Iris Segmentation on FPGA

In this paper, a real time FPGA-based iris segmentation system is presented. The segmentation method implements the Canny edge detection algorithm and a circle search to detect an iris in an image or video frame. The proposed high performance architecture utilizes on-chip memory to significantly improve the throughput of the pipelined and parallel structure. A data forwarding technique is incorporated in the design to efficiently utilize the FPGA's embedded resources. The proposed architecture demonstrates a high speed processing capability that will facilitate the use of dedicated hardware to support an iris recognition application for large databases.