A Survey on FPGA Implementations in Embedded Augmented Reality Applications

Since a long ago, most of the Augmented Reality (AR) applications are built using some general purpose devices such as computers and handhelds. In such general purpose devices, tasks are being processed using different softwares that make it difficult to obtain the real time results with high resolution and frame rate. There is a need to maintain a good performance but it invariably results into high cost of the overall project due to the requirement of higher clock frequency and high power. Mobility and processing power are the two basic requirements of an augmented reality application to provide an efficient immersion to the end user. An embedded architecture developed on Field Programmable Gate Array Logic (FPGA) can supply both mobility and processing power to the AR applications. FPGA is a tiny chip that has the efficiency of hardware level executions. This paper gives a detailed account of FPGAs in AR applications in the field of computer vision & image processing, multimedia & computer graphics, communication and wearable computing.