An FPGA-Based Hardware Accelerator for Traffic Sign Detection

Traffic sign detection plays an important role in a number of practical applications, such as intelligent driver assistance and roadway inventory management. In order to process the large amount of data from either real-time videos or large off-line databases, a high-throughput traffic sign detection system is required. In this paper, we propose an FPGA-based hardware accelerator for traffic sign detection based on cascade classifiers. To maximize the throughput and power efficiency, we propose several novel ideas, including: 1) rearranged numerical operations; 2) shared image storage; 3) adaptive workload distribution; and 4) fast image block integration. The proposed design is evaluated on a Xilinx ZC706 board. When processing high-definition (1080p) video, it achieves the throughput of 126 frames/s and the energy efficiency of 0.041 J/frame.