Line object extraction and image matching based on an intelligent image card

A robot vision system is developed based on an intelligent image gathering card that contains an FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) and a DSP (Digital Signal Processor) as main calculators. Two real-time visual modules are developed through the cooperation of hardware logics on FPGA and software on DSP. First, with edge images extracted by the FPGA, a highly efficient algorithm is designed to extract a line object on the ground with DSP on real-time. Second, an image matching algorithm based on gray variance forms is designed, which is robust to illumination changing. Real-time computation is achieved by implementing this algorithm on FPGA, and object recognition is realized further.