A novel arrangement for efficiently handling image border in FPGA filter implementation

An important issue in image filtering is dealing with situations when the filter window partly covers the image near its borders, because the filter window needs to be completely filled to yield a valid result. It can result in erroneous result, if not taken into consideration. It is likely to consume more resources with border handled filtering conditions. A novel method is presented in this paper which efficiently manages the borders of an image with minimum additional resources. It does not introduce any delay to the normal filtering of the image. The input is streamed into the filter without caching or stalling. Also there is no need of priming a filter and flushing the contents of the filter at the end of row or frame. This makes our border management method a potential candidate for real-time applications where stalling of input is not tolerable.