HiFlipVX: An Open Source High-Level Synthesis FPGA Library for Image Processing

Abstract

The field of computer vision has been increasing over the past years as it is applied to many different applications nowadays. Additionally, they have become more complex and power demanding. On one hand, standards and libraries such as OpenCV and OpenVX have been proposed to ease development. On the other hand, FPGAs have proven to be energy efficient on image processing. The tendency over the last years has turned into using High-Level Synthesis (HLS), to ease their programmability. We present a highly optimized, parametrizable and streaming capable HLS open-source library for FPGAs called HiFlipVX. Due to its structure, it is straightforward to use and simple to add new functions. Furthermore, it is easily portable as it is based on the OpenVX standard. HiFlipVX also adds different features such as auto-vectorization. The library achieves an efficient resource utilization and a significant scalability, also in comparison to the reference (xfOpenCV), as shown in the evaluation.