Efficient reconfigurable architectures for 3D medical image compression

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.Recently, the more widespread use of three-dimensional (3-D) imaging modalities, such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), computed tomography (CT), positron emission tomography (PET), and ultrasound (US) have generated a massive amount of volumetric data. These have provided an impetus to the development of other applications, in particular telemedicine and teleradiology. In these fields, medical image compression is important since both efficient storage and transmission of data through high-bandwidth digital communication lines are of crucial importance. Despite their advantages, most 3-D medical imaging algorithms are computationally intensive with matrix transformation as the most fundamental operation involved in the transform-based methods. Therefore, there is a real need for high-performance systems, whilst keeping architectures exible to allow for quick upgradeability with real-time applications. Moreover, in order to obtain efficient solutions for large medical volumes data, an efficient implementation of these operations is of significant importance. Reconfigurable hardware, in the form of field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) has been proposed as viable system building block in the construction of high-performance systems at an economical price. Consequently, FPGAs seem an ideal candidate to harness and exploit their inherent advantages such as massive parallelism capabilities, multimillion gate counts, and special low-power packages. The key achievements of the work presented in this thesis are summarised as follows. Two architectures for 3-D Haar wavelet transform (HWT) have been proposed based on transpose-based computation and partial reconfiguration suitable for 3-D medical imaging applications. These applications require continuous hardware servicing, and as a result dynamic partial reconfiguration (DPR) has been introduced. Comparative study for both non-partial and partial reconfiguration implementation has shown that DPR offers many advantages and leads to a compelling solution for implementing computationally intensive applications such as 3-D medical image compression. Using DPR, several large systems are mapped to small hardware resources, and the area, power consumption as well as maximum frequency are optimised and improved. Moreover, an FPGA-based architecture of the finite Radon transform (FRAT)with three design strategies has been proposed: direct implementation of pseudo-code with a sequential or pipelined description, and block random access memory (BRAM)- based method. An analysis with various medical imaging modalities has been carried out. Results obtained for image de-noising implementation using FRAT exhibits promising results in reducing Gaussian white noise in medical images. In terms of hardware implementation, promising trade-offs on maximum frequency, throughput and area are also achieved. Furthermore, a novel hardware implementation of 3-D medical image compression system with context-based adaptive variable length coding (CAVLC) has been proposed. An evaluation of the 3-D integer transform (IT) and the discrete wavelet transform (DWT) with lifting scheme (LS) for transform blocks reveal that 3-D IT demonstrates better computational complexity than the 3-D DWT, whilst the 3-D DWT with LS exhibits a lossless compression that is significantly useful for medical image compression. Additionally, an architecture of CAVLC that is capable of compressing high-definition (HD) images in real-time without any buffer between the quantiser and the entropy coder is proposed. Through a judicious parallelisation, promising results have been obtained with limited resources. In summary, this research is tackling the issues of massive 3-D medical volumes data that requires compression as well as hardware implementation to accelerate the slowest operations in the system. Results obtained also reveal a significant achievement in terms of the architecture efficiency and applications performance.Ministry of Higher Education Malaysia (MOHE), Universiti Tun Hussein Onn Malaysia (UTHM) and the British Counci

High speed VLSI architectures for DWT in biometric image compression: A study

AbstractBiometrics is a field that navigates through a vast database and extracts only the qualifying data to accelerate the processes of biometric authentication/recognition. Image compression is a vital part of the process. Various Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) architectures have emerged to satisfy the real time requirements of the online processing of the applications. This paper studies various techniques that help in realizing the fast operation of the transform stage of the image compression processes. Various parameters that may involve in optimizations for high speed like computing time, silicon area, memory size etc are considered in the survey

Lossless and low-cost integer-based lifting wavelet transform

Discrete wavelet transform (DWT) is a powerful tool for analyzing real-time signals, including aperiodic, irregular, noisy, and transient data, because of its capability to explore signals in both the frequency- and time-domain in different resolutions. For this reason, they are used extensively in a wide number of applications in image and signal processing. Despite the wide usage, the implementation of the wavelet transform is usually lossy or computationally complex, and it requires expensive hardware. However, in many applications, such as medical diagnosis, reversible data-hiding, and critical satellite data, lossless implementation of the wavelet transform is desirable. It is also important to have more hardware-friendly implementations due to its recent inclusion in signal processing modules in system-on-chips (SoCs). To address the need, this research work provides a generalized implementation of a wavelet transform using an integer-based lifting method to produce lossless and low-cost architecture while maintaining the performance close to the original wavelets. In order to achieve a general implementation method for all orthogonal and biorthogonal wavelets, the Daubechies wavelet family has been utilized at first since it is one of the most widely used wavelets and based on a systematic method of construction of compact support orthogonal wavelets. Though the first two phases of this work are for Daubechies wavelets, they can be generalized in order to apply to other wavelets as well. Subsequently, some techniques used in the primary works have been adopted and the critical issues for achieving general lossless implementation have solved to propose a general lossless method. The research work presented here can be divided into several phases. In the first phase, low-cost architectures of the Daubechies-4 (D4) and Daubechies-6 (D6) wavelets have been derived by applying the integer-polynomial mapping. A lifting architecture has been used which reduces the cost by a half compared to the conventional convolution-based approach. The application of integer-polynomial mapping (IPM) of the polynomial filter coefficient with a floating-point value further decreases the complexity and reduces the loss in signal reconstruction. Also, the “resource sharing” between lifting steps results in a further reduction in implementation costs and near-lossless data reconstruction. In the second phase, a completely lossless or error-free architecture has been proposed for the Daubechies-8 (D8) wavelet. Several lifting variants have been derived for the same wavelet, the integer mapping has been applied, and the best variant is determined in terms of performance, using entropy and transform coding gain. Then a theory has been derived regarding the impact of scaling steps on the transform coding gain (GT). The approach results in the lowest cost lossless architecture of the D8 in the literature, to the best of our knowledge. The proposed approach may be applied to other orthogonal wavelets, including biorthogonal ones to achieve higher performance. In the final phase, a general algorithm has been proposed to implement the original filter coefficients expressed by a polyphase matrix into a more efficient lifting structure. This is done by using modified factorization, so that the factorized polyphase matrix does not include the lossy scaling step like the conventional lifting method. This general technique has been applied on some widely used orthogonal and biorthogonal wavelets and its advantages have been discussed. Since the discrete wavelet transform is used in a vast number of applications, the proposed algorithms can be utilized in those cases to achieve lossless, low-cost, and hardware-friendly architectures

An Adaptive Threshold based FPGA Implementation for Object and Face detection

The moving object and face detection are vital requirement for real time security applications. In this paper, we propose an Adaptive Threshold based FPGA Implementation for Object and Face detection. The input Images and reference Images are preprocessed using Gaussian Filter to smoothen the high frequency components. The 2D-DWT is applied on Gaussian filter outputs and only LL bands are considered for further processing. The modified background with adaptive threshold are used to detect the object with LL band of reference image. The detected object is passed through Gaussian filter to enhance the quality of object. The matching unit is designed to recognize face from standard face database images. It is observed that the performance parameters such as percentage TSR and hardware utilizations are better compared to existing techniques

FPGA Implementation of Fingerprint Recognition System using Adaptive Threshold Technique

The real time fingerprint biometric system is implemented using FGPA. In this paper, we propose FPGA Implementation of Fingerprint Recognition System using Adaptive Threshold Technique with novel adaptive threshold for each person. The fingerprint images are considered from FVC2004 (DB3_A) and processed to resize fingerprint size to 256x256. The DWT is applied on fingerprint and considered only LL coefficients as features of fingerprint. The Adaptive Threshold value for each person is computed using Deviations between two successive samples of a person, Average Deviation, Standard Deviation and constant. The Adaptive Threshold for test image is computed using Deviations between test images and samples of database, Average Deviation, Standard Deviation and constant. If the Average Threshold of test image is less than Average Threshold of a person then it is considered as match else mismatched. It is observed that the success rate of identifying a person is high in the proposed method compared to existing techniques and also the device utilization in the proposed architecture is less compared to existing architecture

Parallel 3D Fast Wavelet Transform comparison on CPUs and GPUs

We present in this paper several implementations of the 3D Fast Wavelet Transform (3D-FWT) on multicore CPUs and manycore GPUs. On the GPU side, we focus on CUDA and OpenCL programming to develop methods for an efficient mapping on manycores. On multicore CPUs, OpenMP and Pthreads are used as counterparts to maximize parallelism, and renowned techniques like tiling and blocking are exploited to optimize the use of memory. We evaluate these proposals and make a comparison between a new Fermi Tesla C2050 and an Intel Core 2 QuadQ6700. Speedups of the CUDA version are the best results, improving the execution times on CPU, ranging from 5.3x to 7.4x for different image sizes, and up to 81 times faster when communications are neglected. Meanwhile, OpenCL obtains solid gains which range from 2x factors on small frame sizes to 3x factors on larger ones