The effects of radiation-induced soft errors on hardware implementations of object-tracking algorithms

Hardware implementations of Object-Tracking Algorithms, like most integrated circuits, are susceptible to radiation-induced soft errors. This work evaluated the reliability of a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) prototype for object-tracking algorithms via fault emulation experiments conducted at the register-transfer level (RTL). Faults were injected into the main sub-modules within the object-tracking system. The results show that RTL faults can cause observable errors in the system outputs. The level of degradation is related to the fault injection location as well as the type of fault. Under our worst-case experiment, the output error rate was more than 94% when using an overlap ratio of 0.8 as the threshold for erroneous tracking.