A hardware accelerator for real-time extraction of the linear-time MSER algorithm

This paper presents a novel hardware accelerator architecture for the linear-time Maximally Stable Extremal Regions (MSER) detector algorithm. In contrast to the standard MSER algorithm, the linear-time MSER implementation is more suitable for real-time applications of image retrieval in large-scale and high resolution datasets (e.g. satellite images). The linear-time MSER accelerator design is optimized by enhancing its flooding process (which is one of the major drawbacks of the standard linear-time MSER) using a structure that we called stack of pointers, which makes it memory-efficient as it reduces the memory requirement by nearly 90%. The accelerator is configurable and can be integrated with many image processing algorithms, allowing a wide spectrum of potential real-time applications to be realized even on small and power-limited devices.