FPGA accelerator for real-time skin segmentation

Many real-time image processing applications are confronted with performance limitations when implemented in software. The skin segmentation algorithm utilized in hand gesture recognition as developed by the ICT department of Delft University of Technology presents an example of such an application. This paper presents the design of an FPGA based accelerator which alleviates the host PC's computational effort required for real-time skin segmentation. We show that our design utilizes no more than 88% of the resources available within the targeted XC2VP30 device. In addition, the proposed approach is highly portable and not limited to the considered real-time image processing algorithm only