A real-time near infrared image acquisition system based on image quality assessment

• Main Authors: Lee, Y. H., Khalil-Hani, M., Bakhteri, R., Nambiar, V. P.
• Format: Article
• Published: Springer Verlag 2017
• Subjects: TK Electrical engineering. Electronics Nuclear engineering
• Online Access: http://eprints.utm.my/id/eprint/76542/; https://www.scopus.com/inward/record.uri?eid=2-s2.0-84964063134&doi=10.1007%2fs11554-016-0586-y&partnerID=40&md5=fe65ec64fce8d3fbb304c09cc2f28b2f

This paper presents a real-time image acquisition system with an improved image quality assessment module to acquire high-quality near infrared (NIR) images. Thermal imaging plays a vital role in a wide range of medical and military applications. The demand for high-throughput image acquisition and image processing has continuously increased especially for critical medical and military purposes where executions under real-time constraints are required. This work implements an NIR image quality assessment module, which utilizes improved two-dimensional entropy and mask-based edge detection algorithms. The effectiveness of the proposed image quality assessment algorithms is demonstrated through the implementation of a complete finger-vein biometric system. The proposed model is implemented as an embedded system on a field programmable gate array prototyping platform. By including the image quality assessment module, the proposed system is able to achieve a recognition accuracy of 0.87 % equal error rate, and can handle real-time processing at 15 frames/s (live video rate). This is achieved through hardware acceleration of the proposed image quality assessment algorithms via a novel streaming architecture.