Real-time image and video processing: Method and architecture

Nowadays, image and video processing applications are becoming widely used in many domains including industrials, medical imaging, manufacturing, and security systems. Real time image and video processing is a very demanding task as it needs to perform high computations for a big amount of data represented by the image, and the complex operations, which may need to be performed on the image. For these reasons, there is a move toward hardware solutions, which are known to be faster for such treatments. Embedded hardware systems are knowing an explosive growth in manufacturing and usage. Designing such systems is becoming critical task, as implementation technology is oriented toward complex functionalities with an increasing time to market pressure. To resolve these issues, the combination of appropriate methodology and architecture to ensure reuse and control over time and cost is a challenging idea. In this context, we explore the principle of PBD (Platform Based Design) as a design methodology that favors system reuse and allows the exploration of the trade-offs between different design requirements. We have used the PBD to design a real time video acquisition and display module. The proposed module is implemented on Virtex-5 FPGA.