Hardware-Friendly Vision Algorithm Using FPGA Embedded I/O Resources

Abstract

With the advent of mobile embedded multimedia devices that are required to perform a range of multimedia tasks, especially image processing tasks, the need to design efficient and high performance image processing systems in a short time-to-market schedule needs to be addressed. Image Processing algorithms implemented in hardware have emerged as the most viable solution for improving the performance of image processing systems. A single-chip FPGA implementation of a vision core is an efficient way to design fast and compact embedded vision systems from the PCB design level. The scope of the project is to design a novel FPGA-based parallel architecture for embedded vision entirely with on-chip FPGA resources. Block-RAMs and IO interfaces are used for the design. As a result, the system is compact, fast and flexible. Architectures for several mid-level neighbourhood algorithms are designed using Xilinx Sparton 3E FPGA. The algorithm uses a vision core which supports image processing on a low-resolution image. The simulation results are compared with existing FPGA implementations. The performance of the algorithms could be substantially improved by applying sufficient parallelism.