Biometric systems such as face, palm and fingerprint recognition are very computationally expensive. The ever growing biometric database sizes have posed a need for faster search algorithms. High resolution images are expensive to process and slow down less powerful extraction algorithms. There is an apparent need to improve both the signal processing and the searching algorithms. Researchers have continually searched for new ways of improving the recognition algorithms in order to keep up with the high pace of the scientific and information security world. Most such developments, however, are architecture- or hardware-specific and do not port well to other platforms. This research proposes a cheaper and portable alternative. With the use of the Single Program Multiple Data programming architecture, a distributed fingerprint recognition algorithm is developed and executed on a powerful cluster. The first part in the parallelization of the algorithm is distributing the image enhancement algorithm which comprises of a series of computationally intensive image processing operations. Different processing elements work concurrently on different parts of the same image in order to speed up the processing. The second part of parallelization speeds up searching/ matching through a parallel search. A database is partitioned as evenly as possible amongst the available processing nodes which work independently to search their respective partitions. Each processor returns a match with the highest similarity score and the template with the highest score among those returned is returned as match given that the score is above a certain threshold. The system performance with respect to response time is then formalized in a form of a performance model which can be used to predict the performance of a distributed system given network parameters and number of processing nodes. The proposed algorithm introduces a novel approach to memory distribution of block-wise image processing operations and discusses three different ways to process pixels along the partitioning axes of the distributed images. The distribution and parallelization of the recognition algorithm gains up to as much as 12.5 times performance in matching and 10.2 times in enhancement. / Thesis (M.Sc.Eng.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2012.

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