Faber: A Hardware/SoftWare Toolchain for Image Registration

Abstract

Image registration is a well-defined computation paradigm widely applied to align one or more images to a target image. This paradigm, which builds upon three main components, is particularly compute-intensive and represents many image processing pipelines’ bottlenecks. State-of-the-art solutions leverage hardware acceleration to speed up image registration, but they are usually limited to implementing a single component. We present Faber, an open-source HW/SW CAD toolchain tailored to image registration. The Faber toolchain comprises HW/SW highly-tunable registration components, supports users with different expertise in building custom pipelines, and automates the design process. In this direction, Faber provides both default settings for entry-level users and latency and resource models to guide HW experts in customizing the different components. Finally, Faber achieves from 1.5× to 54× in speedup and from 2× to 177× in energy efficiency against state-of-the-art tools on a Xeon Gold.