Design space exploration for image processing architectures on FPGA targets

Due to the emergence of embedded applications in image and video processing, communication and cryptography, improvement of pictorial information for better human perception like deblurring, denoising in several fields such as satellite imaging, medical imaging, mobile applications etc. are gaining importance for renewed research. Behind such developments, the primary responsibility lies with the advancement of semiconductor technology leading to FPGA based programmable logic devices, which combines the advantages of both custom hardware and dedicated DSP resources. In addition, FPGA provides powerful reconfiguration feature and hence is an ideal target for rapid prototyping. We have endeavoured to exploit exceptional features of FPGA technology in respect to hardware parallelism leading to higher computational density and throughput, and have observed better performances than those one can get just merely porting the image processing software algorithms to hardware. In this paper, we intend to present an elaborate review, based on our expertise and experiences, on undertaking necessary transformation to an image processing software algorithm including the optimization techniques that makes its operation in hardware comparatively faster.