Design and VLSI implementation of an ASIC for real-time manipulation of digital colour images

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Abstract This paper presents the design and VLSI implementation, on a single chip, of a new real-time colour space converter, which performs the transformation of the RGB colour coordinates to the intensity, hue and saturation (IHS) colour space. This high speed VLSI chip is designed to work at 13.3 MHz and can process high resolution colour images of up to 697 pixels per horizontal line. Its minimum rate of operation is 133 MIPS. The high speed of operation was achieved by pipelining the data in a vector fashion. The chip was implemented using a DLM, 1.0 μm, N-well, CMOS process provided by European Silicon Structures and the die size dimensions for the chip are 5.669 mm x 6.144 mm = 34.830 mm2. The chip is intended to be used as the front end of colour machine vision systems in inspection tasks and in autonomous applications, where the need for short processing times is crucial. Finally, simulation results exhibiting the usefulness of the IHS colour space transform using the proposed ASIC and real colour image data are also presented.