A Fully Pipelined FPGA Architecture for Multiscale BRISK Descriptors With a Novel Hardware-Aware Sampling Pattern

Abstract

Binary descriptors have been shown to be faster than nonbinary descriptors while producing comparable results in image matching applications. In recent years, there have been many attempts to design hardware accelerators for extraction of binary descriptors to achieve higher processing rates. One of the well-known methods is the binary robust invariant scalable key point (BRISK) algorithm, which has shown outstanding results in various applications. In this work, we propose a multiscale field-programmable gate array (FPGA)-based hardware architecture for the BRISK descriptor. In addition, a new image sampling pattern for the BRISK algorithm is described which is shown to be more efficient than the original sampling pattern for hardware implementation. Our new sampling pattern decreases the size of the patches containing the key point to one-quarter of the size of that used in the original BRISK algorithm, which leads to a reduction in FPGA resource utilization while maintaining the accuracy of the image matching application. Our proposed design is fully pipelined and achieves a frame rate of 78 fps on images with full HD resolution.