Special issue on design and architectures of real-time image processing in embedded systems

Abstract

Current embedded systems are increasingly used to support high-performance applications. This is due to the diffusion of these systems in the domain of mobile devices and the need of a large number of services required from these systems. To support the execution of these applications, several architectures based on CPU, GPU or FPGA have been developed and are still under investigation. When the application demands both performance and flexibility, architectures based on several types of execution resources are of high benefit. In this context, designers define architectures which include all the necessary resources on the same chip, also called ‘‘Multiprocessor System on a Chip’’ (MPSoC). Image processing is one of the major applications in embedded domain, which requires high effort in computation. Image processing for medicine, automotive, and for video compression is the main algorithm that has been addressed by the authors of the Design and Architecture for Image and Signal Processing (DASIP) conference. This special issue presents several papers which address this general topic, and also presents papers dealing with the implementation complexity as well as exploring different opportunities concerning the possible architectures of CPU, GPGPU, FPGA and ASIC implementations. Comparisons among these different technologies are also presented in order to attempt defining the best implementation of the applications. Due to the complexities of the applications and architectures, research concerning methodologies for implementation is also addressed in this special issue. The main objective is to provide designers efficient methodologies and tools which can help during the exploration of different implementation opportunities. In the next paragraph, the guest editors provide a brief description of each paper presented in this special issue. We wish to have provided JRTIP readers a good reading collection and hope that these selected papers will be a source of inspiration for future works.