An extended analysis of memory hierarchies for efficient implementations of image processing applications

Abstract

Through continued miniaturization of electronic devices embedded smart cameras are steadily becoming more and more important. The reduction of the camera size increases the spectrum of applications. In industrial applications the range of smart cameras spans from quality monitoring and position tracking to the calibration of production machines. In non-professional applications a distinct boom in action cameras combined with fused sensor information can be observed. However, all of these applications have a common bottleneck: the memory architecture. Most image processing applications are memory-bound tasks. Thus, the amount of time for transferring data with image processing applications decisively affects the application’s entire processing time. Different memory access patterns require different memory configurations and hierarchies. An insufficient match between the image processing application and the memory architecture leads to a poor performance in the image processing system. This can lead to longer processing times, and larger energy consumption rates. This work introduces new methods of classifying image processing applications by using their memory access pattern for mapping on memory architectures. Our work combines a simulation framework the heterogenous memory simulator with a analytical framework the memory analyzer to find bottlenecks inside the image processing application and aids in finding a suitable, application-specific memory configuration in terms of processing time and energy consumption.