Realizing real‐time centroid detection of multiple objects with marching pixels algorithms on programmable customizing hardware

Abstract

SUMMARYIn this paper, we present a class of emergent algorithms called Marching Pixels and a corresponding programmable parallel chip architecture. Marching Pixels can be used for real‐time image processing in smart camera chips. They are based on hardware agents, which are virtually crawling in a pixel grid image to find attributes like centroid, rotation, and size of an arbitrary number of objects given in an image. Because of the distributed and local processing scheme of Marching Pixels, reply times in milliseconds can be fulfilled. This means that time is determined where pre‐known objects are located and how they are oriented to the main axes of the image. We present an example Marching Pixels algorithm and corresponding application‐specific and programmable parallel architectures. The latter contains a specific instruction set that allows not only the execution of Marching Pixels algorithms but also of arbitrary Cellular Automata algorithms as an embedded parallel processor. The strengths and weaknesses of this architecture concerning the realization as field‐programmable gate arrays and application‐specific integrated circuits are discussed by means of hardware synthesis results. These results are compared with the solution achievable on a real hardware like the Atom processor. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.