An investigation of FPGA implementation for image processing

Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) were not specifically invented for image processing application but its intrinsic parallel computation capability offers high-performance image processing solutions, which are often tenfold and even hundredfold faster than traditional processors. However, not every image processing algorithm is suitable for FPGAs. It is significant to understand the strengths and limitations of FPGA, which we will address in this paper. Further we will discuss the following two concerns 1) what kinds of algorithms can be easily implemented in FPGAs? 2) System architecture that meets the needs of video-rate processing. Finally, this paper introduces the system-level tools required for transforming the algorithm into an FPGA implementation and describes an Intellectual Property (IP) design example.