GPU Processing for Biometric Big Data Based Identification. Why and what for?

The identification of people by means of biometric features has been an active research topic before computers started being used for such tasks. The scale of problems than can be addressed by the use of personal computers or computer clusters has grown but there are still real-world scenarios where the biometric features database cannot be processed in real time. This paper tackles the use of graphics processing units (GPUs) which are high performance and cost effective computing elements, as building blocks of large-scale identification systems. A review of the existing GPU based systems is introduced focusing on GPU based fingerprint matching systems. The impressive results obtained by GPU-based systems are only possible by applying a careful biometric matching algorithm redesign, task granularity, asynchronous memory transfers and task overlapping techniques.