  Two critical steps in fingerprint recognition are binarization and thinning
of the image. The need for real time processing motivates us to select local
adaptive thresholding approach for the binarization step. We introduce a new
hardware for this purpose based on pipeline architecture. We propose a formula
for selecting an optimal block size for the thresholding purpose. To decrease
minutiae false detection, the binarized image is dilated. We also present in
this paper a new pipeline structure for implementing the thinning algorithm
