Design of a configurable accelerator for moment computation

The method of moments is one of the most powerful techniques for image analysis. However, real-time applications of this method have been prohibited due to the computational intensity in calculating the moments. This paper presents a novel configurable hardware accelerator for expediting the moment computation. The fundamental building block of the proposed accelerator is a custom-designed floating-point moment processing element (MPE). Running at 75 MHz, the MPE can provide a 12X speedup over a 166 MHz TMS320C6701 digital signal processor. On top of this, a linear performance boost can be obtained by connecting up to eight MPEs into a one-dimensional (1-D) array.