High-Speed Image Processing and Data Transmission Based on Vivado HLS and AXI4-Stream Interface

Abstract

In this paper, the embedded image processing system based on ZYNQ-7000 SOC is designed to achieve feature extraction and high-speed data transmission. This system overcomes the shortcomings of high power consumption, long delay time and limited bandwidth in traditional embedded image processing systems. To maximize the advantages of ZYNQ Processor System (PS) and Programmable Logic (PL), the computationally intensive feature extraction algorithm was implemented not only in PL with its speciality of parallel computing to enhance the processing speed but also in PS to increase the flexibility of the system. Moreover, High-Level Synthesis (HLS) tool in Vivado was used to generate the Intellectual Property (IP) core in PL for accelerating the processing of feature extraction and coordinates calculation. Furthermore, in the data transmission interface, the fast Advanced eXtensible Interface (AXI) 4-Stream bus was selected for image Stream. Meanwhile, the coordinate information of the feature points was stored as the pixels of image via AXI4-Stream. This method simplified the circuit and increased the transmission rate. The comparative experimental results reveal the proposed image processing and transmission scheme has a higher speed with 15.6 times faster than implementing in ARM.