Crookes, Daniel

Deng, Tiantai

Siddiqui, Fahad Manzoor

Woods, Roger

FPGAs can offer high performance with low power and low hardware usage. However, with current software, FPGA sare hard to program, and lengthy re-synthesis times make them unsuitable for the algorithm experimentation which is typical of developing image processing applications. In this paper, we present a system model based on a set of Soft Co-Processors, each of which implements a basic image-level operation (or a common combination of such operations) based on the high-level operators in Image Algebra. Both ‘debug’ (generic but unoptimised) and‘release’ (specific and optimised) versions of the SoftCo-Processors can be used. The advantage of debug mode is that no re-synthesis is required during algorithm experimentation. For release mode, a novel macro-based transformation tool enablesthe creation of a set of reusable HLS skeleton co-processors which require the user only to write a C function to obtain a new,special-purpose Soft Co-Processor.Initial experiments with several algorithms show that the areaand speed overheads for using debug (rather than release) mode are both around 25-30%, thus enabling algorithm development to take place on the FPGA itself. For creating function-specific Co-processors using our macro-based tool, the overheads compared with an expert hardware design are around 20%

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Accelerating image algorithm development using soft co-processor on FPGAs

https://pure.qub.ac.uk/ws/files/155329878/ISSC_Paper_Final.pdf

Accelerating Image Algorithm Development using Soft Co-processor on FPGAs

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