Automated target recognition on Splash 2

Abstract

Automated target recognition is an application area that requires special-purpose hardware to achieve reasonable performance. FPGA-based platforms can provide a high level of performance for ATR systems if the implementation can be adapted to the limited FPGA and routing resources of these architectures. This paper discusses a mapping experiment where a linear-systolic implementation of an ATR algorithm is mapped to the Splash 2 platform. Simple column-oriented processors were used throughout the design to achieve high performance with limited nearest-neighbor communication. The distributed Splash 2 memories are also exploited to achieve a high degree of parallelism. The resulting design is scalable and can be spread across multiple Splash 2 boards with a linear increase in performance.