FPGA-Based Real-Time Image Segmentation for Medical Systems and Data Processing

Three-dimensional (3-D) image segmentation is one of the most demanding tasks in image processing. The applications comprise industrial and scientific tasks. Due to the high data volume, advanced algorithms cannot be processed on standard hardware in real time. We propose the perfectly parallelizable 3-D Gray-Value Structure Code (3-D-GSC) for image segmentation on a new FPGA custom machine. This 128-Bit FPGA coprocessing board features an up-to-date Virtex-II Pro architecture, two large independent DDR-SDRAM channels, two fast independent ZBT-SRAM channels, and PCI-X bus and CameraLink interfaces. The hardware speeds up the segmentation algorithm and allows processing of a 512³ image (16 bpv) in about 2 s