FPGA: AN EFFECTIVE AND PROMISING PLATFORM FOR REAL TIME IMAGE PROCESSING APPLICATIONS

The reconfigurable computing technology in FPGAs , along with many other features of FPGAs make them ideally suited for real-time video processing.

ADVANTAGES OF FPGAs

The salient features of FPGAs that make them superior in speed, over conventional general-purpose hardware like Pentiums is their greater I/O bandwidth to local memory, pipelining, parallelism and availability of optimizing compiler.

Which involve, multiple image operators, run much faster on FPGAs than on Pentiums ref report 800 time speed up by FPGA using SA-C. There are several reasons for such large speed up which FPGAs have over PCs. In comparison to an FPGA, hardware such as Pentium runs at memory speed, not at cache speed.

Evaluation of FPGAs as Platform for Developing DIP Applications 3.1 Advantages of FPGAs Many advantages of FPGAs make them a preferred choice of implementation in DIP realm.

High computational density in FPGA together with a low development costs allows even the lowest volume consumer market to bear the development costs of FPGAs.

LIMITATIONS OF FPGAs

On the other hand, these are the limitations of FPGAs for image processing applications.

Current FPGAs cannot be reconfigured quickly as the process of modifying or combining FPGA circuits is also laborious.

SA-C is a single-assignment dialect of the C programming language designed to exploit many features of FPGAs [13, 14]. To compare the performance of FPGAs and the Pentium processors, they have implemented SA-C programs compiled to a Xilinx FPGA to equivalent programs running on an 800 MHz Pentium III. For 8 common DIP routines implemented on both these platforms, FPGAs offer 8 to 800 times speed-ups over the Pentium.

The authors in report the speed ups that FPGAs offer on image processing methods on 2D and 3D images In computer vision and image processing, FPGAs have already been used to accelerate real-time point tracking , stereo , color-based object detection , and video and image compression.

CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK

The greater future potential lies in including FPGAs on-chip with the main processor, giving the benefit of general purpose acceleration without the communication bottleneck created by placing the FPGA in a co-processor

With a multi billion-dollar market per year, increases in FPGA speeds and capacities have followed or exceeded Moore’s law for the last several years. This survey clearly demonstrates the outstanding features of FPGAs which make them seem very promising choice for the researchers in the field