Implementation of face recognition system in virtex II Pro platform

Low cost implementation of an accurate face recognition system is useful in many applications. A face recognition algorithm based on PCA and wavelets is proposed. Effectiveness of using wavelets before PCA is shown by performing comparison of different simulation results. Complete hardware implementation of the recognition phase is then proposed. The main contribution of this work is the low execution time and minimal internal FPGA consumed resources. The proposed architecture includes three building blocks of the recognition phase. First, a wavelet transform of the image is generated using the convolution version, then, the projection in the eigenspace and the distance. It is shown that the entire face recognition system can be implemented on FPGA virtex II PRO. This implementation shows acceptable hardware resources occupation and a maximum frequency of 46.794MHz for a 60×60 image.