Bailey D.G. Design for Embedded Image Processing on FPGAs

Издательство IEEE/John Wiley, 2011, -497 pp.This book is written primarily for those who are familiar with the basics of image processing and want to consider implementing image processing using FPGAs. It accomplishes this by presenting the techniques and approaches that we wished we knew when we were starting in this area. Perhaps the biggest hurdle is switching from a software mindset to a hardware way of thinking. Very often, when programming software, we do so without great consideration of the underlying architecture. Perhaps this is because the architecture of most software processors is sufficiently similar that any differences are really only a second order effect, regardless of how significant they may appear to a computer engineer. A good compiler is able to map the algorithm in the programming language onto the architecture relatively efficiently, so we can get away without thinking too much about such things. When programming hardware though, architecture is everything. It is not simply a matter of porting the software onto hardware. The underlying hardware architecture needs to be designed as well. In particular, programming hardware usually requires transforming the algorithm into an appropriate parallel architecture, often with significant changes to the algorithm itself. This is not something that the current generation of compilers is able to do because it requires significant design rather than just decomposition of the dataflow. This book addresses this issue by providing not only algorithms for image processing operations, but also underlying architectures that can be used to implement them efficiently.
This book would also be useful to those who are familiar with programming and applying FPGAs to other problems and are considering image processing applications. While many of the techniques are relevant and applicable to a wide range of application areas, most of the focus and examples are taken from image processing applications. Sufficient detail is given to make many of the algorithms and their implementation clear. However, I would argue that learning image processing is more than just collecting a set of algorithms, and there are any number of excellent image processing texts that provide these. Imaging is a practical discipline that can be learned most effectively by doing, and a software environment provides a significantly greater flexibility and interactivity than learning image processing via FPGAs.
That said, it is in the domain of embedded image processing where FPGAs come into their own. An efficient, low power design requires that the techniques of both the hardware engineer and the software engineer be integrated tightly within the final solution.
This book aims to provide a comprehensive overview of algorithms and techniques for implementing image processing algorithms on FPGAs, particularly for low and intermediate level vision. However, as with design in any field, there is more than one way of achieving a particular task. Much of the emphasis has been placed on stream-based approaches to implementing image processing, as these can efficiently exploit parallelism when they can be used. This emphasis reflects my background and experience in the area, and is not intended to be the last word on the topic.Image Processing
Field Programmable Gate Arrays
Languages
Design Process
Mapping Techniques
Point Operations
Histogram Operations
Local Filters
Geometric Transformations
Linear Transforms
Blob Detection and Labelling
Interfacing
Testing, Tuning and Debugging
Example Applications