Fast fingerprint identification using GPUs

Fingerprints are widely used in a variety of biometric identification systems. The fingerprint matching process is a processing step whose computational requirements limit the size of the fingerprint database that can be dealt with.

Fingerprint matching algorithms based on minutiae are one of the most relevant families of biometric identification techniques. The scalability of these models is determined not only by the number of fingerprints but also the number of minutiae per fingerprint. Therefore, processing millions of fingerprints per second requires being able to process hundreds of millions of minutiae per second.

In this paper we present a new design of the minutiae based fingerprint matching algorithm presented by Jiang et al. specifically created for GPU based massively parallel architectures. The parallel design allows speed-up ratios of up to 15 with one GPU compared to multi-threaded CPU implementations, and up to 54 using several GPUs in parallel and fingerprint processing rates of between 300,000 and 1,500,000 fingerprints per second.