Fast Face Detection in Field Programmable Gate Array

• Published in: 2010 International Conference on Digital Manufacturing & Automation Vol. 1; pp. 719 - 723
• Main Authors: Zheng Yutong, Yang Guosheng, Wu Licheng
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01.12.2010
• Subjects: Automation; Face detection; Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA); Manufacturing; Real-time; Skin color
• ISBN: 0769542867; 9780769542867
• DOI: 10.1109/ICDMA.2010.172

Face detection has been widely used in many fields such as security, intelligent human interface etc., and concerns on how to meet the criterion of miniature and real-time have gradually become independent research topics. Traditionally, systems of face detection/recognition are either implemented in very specific hardware or software system. This paper tailors an algorithm of face detection using skin color and presents an efficient implementation on a single Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) chip. The implementation exploits the inherit parallelism of hardware and takes advantages of hardware multiply-accumulate units and shift register (RAM-Based) units on FPGA. The entire system uses a single FPGA coupled to a pair of SDRAM chips, and no extra parts. The system was implemented and tested with face detection on a 1280×1024 frame taking 16.66 ms (60 frames per second ). This system can be used as a reference for lightweight embedded vision systems.