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

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.