A general-purpose FPGA-based reconfigurable platform for video and image processing

Abstract

This paper presents a general-purpose, multi-task, and reconfigurable platform for video and image processing. With the increasing requirements of processing power in many of today's video and image processing applications, it is important to go beyond the software implementation to provide a real-time, low cost, high performance, and scalable hardware platform. In this paper, we propose a system by using the powerful parallel processing architecture in the Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) to achieve this objective. Based on the proposed system level architecture and design strategies, a prototype system is developed based on the Xilinx Virtex-II FPGA with the integration of embedded processor, memory control and interface technologies. Our system includes different functional modules, such as edge detection, zoom-in and zoom-out functions, which provides the flexibility of using this system as a general video processing platform according to different application requirements. The final system utilizes about 20% of logic resource, 50% of memory on chip, and has total power consumption around 203 mw. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.