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

Efficient architectures and power modelling of multiresolution analysis algorithms on FPGA

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.In the past two decades, there has been huge amount of interest in Multiresolution Analysis Algorithms (MAAs) and their applications. Processing some of their applications such as medical imaging are computationally intensive, power hungry and requires large amount of memory which cause a high demand for efficient algorithm implementation, low power architecture and acceleration. Recently, some MAAs such as Finite Ridgelet Transform (FRIT) Haar Wavelet Transform (HWT) are became very popular and they are suitable for a number of image processing applications such as detection of line singularities and contiguous edges, edge detection (useful for compression and feature detection), medical image denoising and segmentation. Efficient hardware implementation and acceleration of these algorithms particularly when addressing large problems are becoming very chal-lenging and consume lot of power which leads to a number of issues including mobility, reliability concerns. To overcome the computation problems, Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are the technology of choice for accelerating computationally intensive applications due to their high performance. Addressing the power issue requires optimi- sation and awareness at all level of abstractions in the design flow. The most important achievements of the work presented in this thesis are summarised here. Two factorisation methodologies for HWT which are called HWT Factorisation Method1 and (HWTFM1) and HWT Factorasation Method2 (HWTFM2) have been explored to increase number of zeros and reduce hardware resources. In addition, two novel efficient and optimised architectures for proposed methodologies based on Distributed Arithmetic (DA) principles have been proposed. The evaluation of the architectural results have shown that the proposed architectures results have reduced the arithmetics calculation (additions/subtractions) by 33% and 25% respectively compared to direct implementa-tion of HWT and outperformed existing results in place. The proposed HWTFM2 is implemented on advanced and low power FPGA devices using Handel-C language. The FPGAs implementation results have outperformed other existing results in terms of area and maximum frequency. In addition, a novel efficient architecture for Finite Radon Trans-form (FRAT) has also been proposed. The proposed architecture is integrated with the developed HWT architecture to build an optimised architecture for FRIT. Strategies such as parallelism and pipelining have been deployed at the architectural level for efficient im-plementation on different FPGA devices. The proposed FRIT architecture performance has been evaluated and the results outperformed some other existing architecture in place. Both FRAT and FRIT architectures have been implemented on FPGAs using Handel-C language. The evaluation of both architectures have shown that the obtained results out-performed existing results in place by almost 10% in terms of frequency and area. The proposed architectures are also applied on image data (256 £ 256) and their Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) is evaluated for quality purposes. Two architectures for cyclic convolution based on systolic array using parallelism and pipelining which can be used as the main building block for the proposed FRIT architec-ture have been proposed. The first proposed architecture is a linear systolic array with pipelining process and the second architecture is a systolic array with parallel process. The second architecture reduces the number of registers by 42% compare to first architec-ture and both architectures outperformed other existing results in place. The proposed pipelined architecture has been implemented on different FPGA devices with vector size (N) 4,8,16,32 and word-length (W=8). The implementation results have shown a signifi-cant improvement and outperformed other existing results in place. Ultimately, an in-depth evaluation of a high level power macromodelling technique for design space exploration and characterisation of custom IP cores for FPGAs, called func-tional level power modelling approach have been presented. The mathematical techniques that form the basis of the proposed power modeling has been validated by a range of custom IP cores. The proposed power modelling is scalable, platform independent and compares favorably with existing approaches. A hybrid, top-down design flow paradigm integrating functional level power modelling with commercially available design tools for systematic optimisation of IP cores has also been developed. The in-depth evaluation of this tool enables us to observe the behavior of different custom IP cores in terms of power consumption and accuracy using different design methodologies and arithmetic techniques on virous FPGA platforms. Based on the results achieved, the proposed model accuracy is almost 99% true for all IP core's Dynamic Power (DP) components.Thomas Gerald Gray Charitable Trus

Strategies for neural networks in ballistocardiography with a view towards hardware implementation

A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the University of LutonThe work described in this thesis is based on the results of a clinical trial conducted by the research team at the Medical Informatics Unit of the University of Cambridge, which show that the Ballistocardiogram (BCG) has prognostic value in detecting impaired left ventricular function before it becomes clinically overt as myocardial infarction leading to sudden death. The objective of this study is to develop and demonstrate a framework for realising an on-line BCG signal classification model in a portable device that would have the potential to find pathological signs as early as possible for home health care. Two new on-line automatic BeG classification models for time domain BeG classification are proposed. Both systems are based on a two stage process: input feature extraction followed by a neural classifier. One system uses a principal component analysis neural network, and the other a discrete wavelet transform, to reduce the input dimensionality. Results of the classification, dimensionality reduction, and comparison are presented. It is indicated that the combined wavelet transform and MLP system has a more reliable performance than the combined neural networks system, in situations where the data available to determine the network parameters is limited. Moreover, the wavelet transfonn requires no prior knowledge of the statistical distribution of data samples and the computation complexity and training time are reduced. Overall, a methodology for realising an automatic BeG classification system for a portable instrument is presented. A fully paralJel neural network design for a low cost platform using field programmable gate arrays (Xilinx's XC4000 series) is explored. This addresses the potential speed requirements in the biomedical signal processing field. It also demonstrates a flexible hardware design approach so that an instrument's parameters can be updated as data expands with time. To reduce the hardware design complexity and to increase the system performance, a hybrid learning algorithm using random optimisation and the backpropagation rule is developed to achieve an efficient weight update mechanism in low weight precision learning. The simulation results show that the hybrid learning algorithm is effective in solving the network paralysis problem and the convergence is much faster than by the standard backpropagation rule. The hidden and output layer nodes have been mapped on Xilinx FPGAs with automatic placement and routing tools. The static time analysis results suggests that the proposed network implementation could generate 2.7 billion connections per second performance

Survey of FPGA applications in the period 2000 – 2015 (Technical Report)

Romoth J, Porrmann M, Rückert U. Survey of FPGA applications in the period 2000 – 2015 (Technical Report).; 2017.Since their introduction, FPGAs can be seen in more and more different fields of applications. The key advantage is the combination of software-like flexibility with the performance otherwise common to hardware. Nevertheless, every application field introduces special requirements to the used computational architecture. This paper provides an overview of the different topics FPGAs have been used for in the last 15 years of research and why they have been chosen over other processing units like e.g. CPUs

Efficient FPGA implementation and power modelling of image and signal processing IP cores

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are the technology of choice in a number ofimage and signal processing application areas such as consumer electronics, instrumentation, medical data processing and avionics due to their reasonable energy consumption, high performance, security, low design-turnaround time and reconfigurability. Low power FPGA devices are also emerging as competitive solutions for mobile and thermally constrained platforms. Most computationally intensive image and signal processing algorithms also consume a lot of power leading to a number of issues including reduced mobility, reliability concerns and increased design cost among others. Power dissipation has become one of the most important challenges, particularly for FPGAs. Addressing this problem requires optimisation and awareness at all levels in the design flow. The key achievements of the work presented in this thesis are summarised here. Behavioural level optimisation strategies have been used for implementing matrix product and inner product through the use of mathematical techniques such as Distributed Arithmetic (DA) and its variations including offset binary coding, sparse factorisation and novel vector level transformations. Applications to test the impact of these algorithmic and arithmetic transformations include the fast Hadamard/Walsh transforms and Gaussian mixture models. Complete design space exploration has been performed on these cores, and where appropriate, they have been shown to clearly outperform comparable existing implementations. At the architectural level, strategies such as parallelism, pipelining and systolisation have been successfully applied for the design and optimisation of a number of cores including colour space conversion, finite Radon transform, finite ridgelet transform and circular convolution. A pioneering study into the influence of supply voltage scaling for FPGA based designs, used in conjunction with performance enhancing strategies such as parallelism and pipelining has been performed. Initial results are very promising and indicated significant potential for future research in this area. A key contribution of this work includes the development of a novel high level power macromodelling technique for design space exploration and characterisation of custom IP cores for FPGAs, called Functional Level Power Analysis and Modelling (FLPAM). FLPAM is scalable, platform independent and compares favourably with existing approaches. A hybrid, top-down design flow paradigm integrating FLPAM with commercially available design tools for systematic optimisation of IP cores has also been developed

Efficient architectures and power modelling of multiresolution analysis algorithms on FPGA

In the past two decades, there has been huge amount of interest in Multiresolution Analysis Algorithms (MAAs) and their applications. Processing some of their applications such as medical imaging are computationally intensive, power hungry and requires large amount of memory which cause a high demand for efficient algorithm implementation, low power architecture and acceleration. Recently, some MAAs such as Finite Ridgelet Transform (FRIT) Haar Wavelet Transform (HWT) are became very popular and they are suitable for a number of image processing applications such as detection of line singularities and contiguous edges, edge detection (useful for compression and feature detection), medical image denoising and segmentation. Efficient hardware implementation and acceleration of these algorithms particularly when addressing large problems are becoming very chal-lenging and consume lot of power which leads to a number of issues including mobility, reliability concerns. To overcome the computation problems, Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are the technology of choice for accelerating computationally intensive applications due to their high performance. Addressing the power issue requires optimi- sation and awareness at all level of abstractions in the design flow. The most important achievements of the work presented in this thesis are summarised here. Two factorisation methodologies for HWT which are called HWT Factorisation Method1 and (HWTFM1) and HWT Factorasation Method2 (HWTFM2) have been explored to increase number of zeros and reduce hardware resources. In addition, two novel efficient and optimised architectures for proposed methodologies based on Distributed Arithmetic (DA) principles have been proposed. The evaluation of the architectural results have shown that the proposed architectures results have reduced the arithmetics calculation (additions/subtractions) by 33% and 25% respectively compared to direct implementa-tion of HWT and outperformed existing results in place. The proposed HWTFM2 is implemented on advanced and low power FPGA devices using Handel-C language. The FPGAs implementation results have outperformed other existing results in terms of area and maximum frequency. In addition, a novel efficient architecture for Finite Radon Trans-form (FRAT) has also been proposed. The proposed architecture is integrated with the developed HWT architecture to build an optimised architecture for FRIT. Strategies such as parallelism and pipelining have been deployed at the architectural level for efficient im-plementation on different FPGA devices. The proposed FRIT architecture performance has been evaluated and the results outperformed some other existing architecture in place. Both FRAT and FRIT architectures have been implemented on FPGAs using Handel-C language. The evaluation of both architectures have shown that the obtained results out-performed existing results in place by almost 10% in terms of frequency and area. The proposed architectures are also applied on image data (256 £ 256) and their Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) is evaluated for quality purposes. Two architectures for cyclic convolution based on systolic array using parallelism and pipelining which can be used as the main building block for the proposed FRIT architec-ture have been proposed. The first proposed architecture is a linear systolic array with pipelining process and the second architecture is a systolic array with parallel process. The second architecture reduces the number of registers by 42% compare to first architec-ture and both architectures outperformed other existing results in place. The proposed pipelined architecture has been implemented on different FPGA devices with vector size (N) 4,8,16,32 and word-length (W=8). The implementation results have shown a signifi-cant improvement and outperformed other existing results in place. Ultimately, an in-depth evaluation of a high level power macromodelling technique for design space exploration and characterisation of custom IP cores for FPGAs, called func-tional level power modelling approach have been presented. The mathematical techniques that form the basis of the proposed power modeling has been validated by a range of custom IP cores. The proposed power modelling is scalable, platform independent and compares favorably with existing approaches. A hybrid, top-down design flow paradigm integrating functional level power modelling with commercially available design tools for systematic optimisation of IP cores has also been developed. The in-depth evaluation of this tool enables us to observe the behavior of different custom IP cores in terms of power consumption and accuracy using different design methodologies and arithmetic techniques on virous FPGA platforms. Based on the results achieved, the proposed model accuracy is almost 99% true for all IP core's Dynamic Power (DP) components.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceThomas Gerald Gray Charitable TrustGBUnited Kingdo

Efficient FPGA implementation and power modelling of image and signal processing IP cores

Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are the technology of choice in a number ofimage and signal processing application areas such as consumer electronics, instrumentation, medical data processing and avionics due to their reasonable energy consumption, high performance, security, low design-turnaround time and reconfigurability. Low power FPGA devices are also emerging as competitive solutions for mobile and thermally constrained platforms. Most computationally intensive image and signal processing algorithms also consume a lot of power leading to a number of issues including reduced mobility, reliability concerns and increased design cost among others. Power dissipation has become one of the most important challenges, particularly for FPGAs. Addressing this problem requires optimisation and awareness at all levels in the design flow. The key achievements of the work presented in this thesis are summarised here. Behavioural level optimisation strategies have been used for implementing matrix product and inner product through the use of mathematical techniques such as Distributed Arithmetic (DA) and its variations including offset binary coding, sparse factorisation and novel vector level transformations. Applications to test the impact of these algorithmic and arithmetic transformations include the fast Hadamard/Walsh transforms and Gaussian mixture models. Complete design space exploration has been performed on these cores, and where appropriate, they have been shown to clearly outperform comparable existing implementations. At the architectural level, strategies such as parallelism, pipelining and systolisation have been successfully applied for the design and optimisation of a number of cores including colour space conversion, finite Radon transform, finite ridgelet transform and circular convolution. A pioneering study into the influence of supply voltage scaling for FPGA based designs, used in conjunction with performance enhancing strategies such as parallelism and pipelining has been performed. Initial results are very promising and indicated significant potential for future research in this area. A key contribution of this work includes the development of a novel high level power macromodelling technique for design space exploration and characterisation of custom IP cores for FPGAs, called Functional Level Power Analysis and Modelling (FLPAM). FLPAM is scalable, platform independent and compares favourably with existing approaches. A hybrid, top-down design flow paradigm integrating FLPAM with commercially available design tools for systematic optimisation of IP cores has also been developed.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Energy efficient hardware acceleration of multimedia processing tools

The world of mobile devices is experiencing an ongoing trend of feature enhancement and generalpurpose multimedia platform convergence. This trend poses many grand challenges, the most pressing being their limited battery life as a consequence of delivering computationally demanding features. The envisaged mobile application features can be considered to be accelerated by a set of underpinning hardware blocks Based on the survey that this thesis presents on modem video compression standards and their associated enabling technologies, it is concluded that tight energy and throughput constraints can still be effectively tackled at algorithmic level in order to design re-usable optimised hardware acceleration cores. To prove these conclusions, the work m this thesis is focused on two of the basic enabling technologies that support mobile video applications, namely the Shape Adaptive Discrete Cosine Transform (SA-DCT) and its inverse, the SA-IDCT. The hardware architectures presented in this work have been designed with energy efficiency in mind. This goal is achieved by employing high level techniques such as redundant computation elimination, parallelism and low switching computation structures. Both architectures compare favourably against the relevant pnor art in the literature. The SA-DCT/IDCT technologies are instances of a more general computation - namely, both are Constant Matrix Multiplication (CMM) operations. Thus, this thesis also proposes an algorithm for the efficient hardware design of any general CMM-based enabling technology. The proposed algorithm leverages the effective solution search capability of genetic programming. A bonus feature of the proposed modelling approach is that it is further amenable to hardware acceleration. Another bonus feature is an early exit mechanism that achieves large search space reductions .Results show an improvement on state of the art algorithms with future potential for even greater savings

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