Real-time FPGA Based Implementation of Color Image Edge Detection

Abstract

Color Image edge detection is very basic and important step for many applications such as image segmentation, image analysis, facial analysis, objects identifications/tracking and many others. The main challenge for real-time implementation of color image edge detection is because of high volume of data to be processed (3 times as compared to gray images). This paper describes the real-time implementation of Sobel operator based color image edge detection using FPGA. Sobel operator is chosen for edge detection due to its property to counteract the noise sensitivity of the simple gradient operator. In order to achieve real-time performance, a parallel architecture is designed, which uses three processing elements to compute edge maps of R, G, and B color components. The architecture is coded using VHDL, simulated in ModelSim, synthesized using Xilinx ISE 10.1 and implemented on Xilinx ML510 (Virtex-5 FX130T) FPGA platform. The complete system is working at 27 MHz clock frequency. The measured performance of our system for standard PAL (720x576) size images is 50 fps (frames per second) and CIF (352x288) size images is 200 fps.