Parallelism Optimized Architecture on FPGA for Real-Time Traffic Light Detection

In this paper, a portable assistance system is designed to help the visually impaired to detect the traffic light. The designed system is realized on the basis of the AdaBoost algorithm, which is fast and robust in object detections. In order to accelerate the AdaBoost-based approach, a flexible parallel architecture is implemented on the field-programmable gate array (FPGA) platform. The architecture is designed utilizing the parallelism of computations in the AdaBoost-based detection. The computations of the window integral image are implemented in parallel, and the confidences of the weak classifiers are calculated in parallel. The parameters of the weak classifiers are trained by the AdaBoost algorithm with multi-layer features in the MATLAB software, and then are configured on the FPGA platform via the Vivado design suite before the detection process. The parallelism optimized architecture is implemented on an Artix-7 FPGA at 200 MHZ. Experiments show that it can detect the traffic light in videos with a rate of 30 frames per second (fps).