Implementation of high performance hardware architecture of OpenSURF algorithm on FPGA

This paper proposes a high performance hardware architecture of Speeded Up Robust Features (SURF) algorithm based on OpenSURF. In order to achieve high processing frame rate, the hardware architecture is designed with several characteristics. Firstly, a sliding window method is proposed to extract feature points in parallel at selected scale levels. As a result, the time cost in feature extraction can be greatly reduced. Secondly, data reuse strategy is proposed in orientation generation and descriptor generation to reduce the memory access times. In this way, 3.87x and 2.25X speedup are achieved respectively. Thirdly, the integral image is segmented to buffer in different memory blocks in order to support multiple data accessing in one clock cycle, which will further reduce the whole calculating time of our implementation. The hardware architecture is implemented on an XC6VSX475T FPGA with 156 MHz and its maximal frame rate for VGA format image can reach 356 frames per second (fps), which is 6.25 times frame rate of OpenSURF running on a server with a Xeon 5650 processor, and 6 times the reported frame rate of the recent implementation on three Vritex4 FPGAs [8].