International Journal of VLSI and Signal Processing Applications, Vol.

1, Issue 2 , May 2011,(38-41) ,ISSN 2231-3133

FPGA Based Area Efficient Edge Detection Filter for Image Processing Applications
Rajesh Mehra1, Rachna B. Sardana2, Rupinder Verma3
1 2

Faculty of ECE Department, NITTTR, Chandigarh, UT, India Faculty of ECE Department, TIT&S, Bhiwani, Haryana, India 3 ME Student, NITTTR, Chandigarh, UT, India

ABSTRACT
In this paper FPGA based efficient design of an adaptive edge-detection filter for image processing application has been presented. The FPGA implementation provides the necessary performance for real-time image and video processing, while retaining the system flexibility to support an adaptive algorithm. A fully parallel fully pipelined MAC algorithm is used to implement the proposed filter. This approach is useful to enhance the system performance by taking optimal advantage of embedded Multipliers, BRAMs and Registers available on target FPGA. The proposed 2D filter is designed using Matlab and Xilinx DSP Tools, synthesized with ISE 10.1 and implemented on Virtex-II Pro based 2vp50ff1148-7 FPGA device. Results show enhanced performance of proposed design in terms of area utilization as compared to standard optimal median filters Key Words: BRAM, FPGA, ISE, MAC, Matlab other hand, programmable DSP processors can be unable to meet desired performance due to their sequential-execution architecture [2]. In this context, embedded FPGAs offer a very attractive solution that balance high flexibility, time-tomarket, cost and performance. Therefore, in this paper, an area and power efficient adaptive edge detection filter is implemented on target FPGA using multiply and accumulate (MAC) technique. There is a constant requirement for efficient use of FPGA resources where occupying less hardware for a given system can yield significant cost-related benefits like: (i) Reduced power consumption; (ii) Area for additional application functionality; (iii) Potential to use a smaller, cheaper FPGA. If very high sampling rates are required [3], fully-parallel hardware must be used where every clock edge feeds a new input sample and produces a new output sample. In case fully parallel implementation is not possible then partly serial approach can be adopted to enhance the system performance. The proposed design is implemented in a fully parallel fully pipelined style by taking optimal advantage of embedded Multipliers, Block RAMs and Registers available on target device. Fully-parallel design cannot share hardware over multiple clock cycles and so tend to occupy large amounts of resource. Hence, efficient implementation of such filters is important to minimize hardware requirement.

I. INTRODUCTION
Real-time video and image processing is used in a wide variety of applications from video surveillance and traffic management to medical imaging applications. These operations often require digital signal processing (DSP) algorithms for several crucial operations [1]. Due to a growing demand for such complex DSP applications, high performance, low-cost Soc implementations of DSP algorithms are receiving increased attention among researchers and design engineers. Although ASICs and DSP chips have been the traditional solution for high performance applications, now the technology and the market demands are looking for changes. On one hand, high development costs and timeto-market factors associated with ASICs can be prohibitive for certain applications while, on the

II. EDGE DETECTION FILTER

Edge detection is a fundamental tool used in most image processing applications to obtain information from the frames as a precursor step to feature extraction and object segmentation. This process detects outlines of an object and

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International Journal of VLSI and Signal Processing Applications, Vol. 1, Issue 2 , May 2011,(38-41) ,ISSN 2231-3133

boundaries between objects and the background in the image. An edge-detection filter can also be used to improve the appearance of blurred or anti-aliased video streams. The basic edge-detection operator is a matrix area gradient operation that determines the level of variance between different pixels. The edgedetection operator is calculated by forming a matrix centered on a pixel chosen as the center of the matrix area. If the value of this matrix area is above a given threshold, then the middle pixel is classified as an edge. Examples of gradientbased edge detectors are Roberts, Prewitt, and Sobel operators [4]-[8]. All the gradient-based algorithms have kernel operators that calculate the strength of the slope in directions which are orthogonal to each other, commonly vertical and horizontal. Later, the contributions of the different components of the slopes are combined to give the total value of the edge strength. The Prewitt operator measures two components. The vertical edge component is calculated with kernel Kx and the horizontal edge component is calculated with kernel Ky as shown in Fig.1. |Kx| + |Ky| gives an indication of the intensity of the gradient in the current pixel.

Fig.2 Proposed Edge Detection Model

Matlab Design

HDL Code

Synthesis

Implementation

Fig.3 Proposed Design Flow

Fig.1 Prewitt horizontal and vertical operators

Depending on the noise characteristics of the image or streaming video, edge detection results can vary. Gradient-based algorithms such as the Prewitt filter have a major drawback of being very sensitive to noise. The size of the kernel filter and coefficients are fixed and cannot be adapted to a given image. An adaptive edgedetection algorithm is necessary to provide a robust solution that is adaptable to the varying noise levels of these images to help distinguish valid image content from visual artifacts introduced by noise [9].

The 5x5 size mask is used to implement the filter. The 2-D filter coefficients are stored in a block RAM and 5 MAC units are used to implement the proposed design in fully parallel and fully pipelined manner. The first step in design flow is to design 5-tap FIR filter using Simulink and System Generator as shown in Fig.3. Then the optimized VHDL code is developed and synthesized using ISE 10.1i and implemented on Virtex target device. Fig.4 shows the original image and Fig.5 shows the image filtered by the proposed edge detection filter.

III. MATLAB BASED DESIGN & SIMULATION

This proposed edge detection design has been developed using a 2-D Image filter as shown in Fig.2. It can be realized efficiently using n-tap MAC FIR Filters.

Fig.4 Original Image

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International Journal of VLSI and Signal Processing Applications, Vol. 1, Issue 2 , May 2011,(38-41) ,ISSN 2231-3133

Fig.7 Speed Performance

Table1. Resource utilization on device

Fig.5 Filtered Image

IV. H/W IMPLEMENTATION RESULTS

The architecture of fully parallel pipelined MAC based design is shown in Fig.6. The MAC based fully parallel implementation uses one multiplier each to process all 5 coefficients in a single clock and pipelined registers are used to enhance the speed performance of the filter. The proposed adaptive edge detection filter is implemented on Virtex II Pro based 2vp50ff1148-7 target device.

Table2. Power Consumption

The proposed design is using 9 embedded BRAMS and 5 embedded multipliers of the target device which results in considerable reduction in used area in terms of number of slices, flip-flops, LUTs etc. The power consumption of the proposed design is 0.2686W at 27.9C.

V. CONCLUSIONS
In this paper, a fully parallel fully pipelined MAC based approach is used to design an area and power efficient adaptive edge detection for real time video and image processing applications. As Compared to adaptive median filters, MAC based design show better result in terms area utilization. The proposed design can work at maximum operating frequency of 291 MHz which is nearly equal to median filter design by consuming only one fourth slices of the target device as compared to optimal median filter design to provide a cost effective solution for image processing applications. The power consumption of the proposed design is 0.2686W at 27.9C.

Fig.6 Fully Parallel MAC Architecture

It can be observed from the timing summary shown in Fig.7 that the proposed design can operate at maximum frequency of 291MHz by consuming 346 slices as compared to optimal median filter maximum frequency of 305 MHz by consuming 1506 slices [10]. The area utilization of the proposed design has been shown in Table1 and its power consumption has been shown in Table2

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International Journal of VLSI and Signal Processing Applications, Vol. 1, Issue 2 , May 2011,(38-41) ,ISSN 2231-3133

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

The authors would like to thank Dr. S. Chatterji, Professor and Head and Dr. Swapna Devi, Associate Professor, Electronics & Communication Engineering Department, NITTTR, Chandigarh for constant encouragement, and guidance during this research work. References
[1] D.J. Allred, H. Yoo, V. Krishnan, W. Huang, and D. Anderson, A Novel High Performance Distributed Arithmetic Adaptive Filter Implementation on an FPGA, in Proc. IEEE Int. Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP04), Vol. 5, pp. 161-164, 2004 [2] Patrick Longa and Ali Miri Area-Efficient FIR Filter Design on FPGAs using Distributed Arithmetic, pp248-252 IEEE International Symposium on Signal Processing and Information Technology, 2006. [3] K.N. Macpherson efficient FIR filters Implementation, IEE Process., Vol. 153, No. 2006. and R.W. Stewart Area for high speed FPGA Proc.-Vis. Image Signal 6, Page711-720, December

weighted median filters for image processing International Conference on Field Programmable Logic and Applications (FPL), pp. 142147, IEEE2005. [10] Zdenek Vasicek and Lukas Sekanina, An Areaefficient Alternative to Adaptive Median Filtering in FPGAs pp. 216-221, International Conference on Field Programmable Logic and Applications (FPL) IEEE 2007.

Authors:

Rajesh Mehra: Mr. Rajesh Mehra is currently Assistant Professor at National Institute of Technical Teachers Training & Research, Chandigarh, India. He is pursuing his PhD from Panjab University, Chandigarh, India. He has completed his M.E. from NITTTR, Chandigarh, India and B.Tech. from NIT, Jalandhar, India. Mr. Mehra has 15 years of academic experience. He has authored more than 15 research papers in reputed International Journals and 35 research papers in National and International conferences. Mr. Mehras interest areas are VLSI Design, Embedded System Design, Advanced Digital Signal Processing, Wireless & Mobile Communication and Digital System Design. Mr. Mehra is life member of ISTE.

[4] Feng-ying Cui and Li-jun Zou, Bei Song, Edge Feature Extraction based on Digital image processing Techniques International Conference on Automation and Logistics, pp. 2320-2324, IEEE 2008. [5] Mohamed Nasir Bin Mohamed Shukor, Lo Hai Hiung, Patrick Sebastian, Implementation of Real time Simple Edge Detection on FPGA International Conference on Intelligent and Advanced Systems, pp. 1404-1406, IEEE 2007. [6] C.Perra, F.Massida, D.D.Giusto, Blockiness Evaluation Based Operator,International Conference on Processing, pp. 389-392, IEEE 2005. Image sobel Image

Rachna Sardana: Ms. Rachna Sardana is currently Senior Lecturer at The Technological Institute of Textile and Sciences,Bhiwani,India.She has completed her M..E from NITTR, Chandigarh, India and B.Tech. from PREC, Pune, India. Ms. Rachna has 13 years of academic experience. Ms. Rachnas interest areas are Signal Processing, Image Processing and VLSI Design.

[7] Zhang Jin-Yu, Chen Yan, Huang Xian-Xiang, Edge Detection of Images Based on improved Sobel operator and Genetic Algorithms, International Conference on Image Analysis and Signal Processing, pp. 31-35, IEEE 2009. [8] Yasri, N.H.Hamid, V.V.Yap, Performance Analysis of FPGA based sobel Edge Detection operator, International Conference on Electronic Design, pp. 1-4, IEEE 2008. [9] S. A. Fahmy, P. Y. K. Cheung, and W. Luk, Novel FPGA based implementation of median and

Rupinder Verma: Ms. Rupinder Verma is pursuing Maters of Engineering from National Institute of Technical Teachers Training & Research, Chandigarh. She has done her Bachelors of Technology from Institute of Engineering and Technology, Bhaddal under Punjab Technical University. She has more than three years of Academic Experience and currently working on VLSI implementation of Edge Detector for various Image Processing applications.

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