Implementation of an Assignment Algorithm for Object Tracking on a FPGA MPSoC

An assignment algorithm is a key step for multi-object tracking. In order to guarantee real-time execution on embedded systems, it is important to choose an efficient algorithm that matches the application context and the implementation constraints. In this paper, we present a comparative study of different implementations of an auction-based assignment algorithm for asymmetric problems on a System On Module (SOM) target based on an ARM processor and an FPGA circuit. This implementation differs with previous works [1], [2] by the context of multi-object tracking on an embedded system, which implies limited assignment problems, as well as by the choice of a more efficient assignment algorithm. Parallelization strategies were applied to achieve high-efficiency levels for both hardware and software implementations. The experimental results obtained show that, first, software implementation is, in most cases, sufficient to achieve the real-time performances and secondly, that proposed implementations perform better than related work ones (~ 130x for software and ~ 1.7x for hardware).