Smart camera based on reconfigurable hardware enables diverse real-time applications

• Published in: 12th Annual IEEE Symposium on Field-Programmable Custom Computing Machines pp. 147 - 155
• Main Authors: Leeser, M., Miller, S., Haiqian Yu
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: Los Alamitos CA IEEE 2004; IEEE Computer Society
• Subjects: Acceleration; Application software; Applied sciences; Artificial intelligence; Biomedical image processing; Computational fluid dynamics; Computer science; control theory; systems; Delay; Design. Technologies. Operation analysis. Testing; Electronics; Exact sciences and technology; Field programmable gate arrays; Hardware; Image processing; Integrated circuits; Pattern recognition. Digital image processing. Computational geometry; Retina; Semiconductor electronics. Microelectronics. Optoelectronics. Solid state devices; Smart cameras; Image quality; Circuit design; Computational fluid dynamics; Image processing; Very large databases; Medical imagery; Field programmable gate array; Reconfigurable architectures; Real time; Modeling; Delay
• DOI: 10.1109/FCCM.2004.53
• ISBN: 0769522300; 9780769522302

We demonstrate the use of a "smart camera " to accelerate two very different image processing applications. The smart camera consists of a high quality video camera and frame grabber connected directly to an FPGA processing board. The advantages of this setup include minimizing the movement of large datasets and minimizing the latency by starting to process data before a complete frame has been acquired. The two applications, one from the area of medical image processing and the other from computational fluid dynamics both exhibit speedups of more than 20 times over software implementations on a 1.5 GHz PC. This smart camera setup is enabling image processing implementations that have not, before now, been achievable in real time.