Architectural analyses of K-Means silicon intellectual property for image segmentation

K-means is a clustering algorithm that is widely applied in many fields, including pattern classification, multimedia analysis, and image retrieval. Due to real-time requirements of image segmentation in embedded systems, it is necessary to accelerate K-means algorithm by hardware implementations. The contribution of this paper includes a series of K-means hardware analyses and a newly proposed SIP for image segmentation in SoC environments. Experiments show that the proposed SIP has the maximum clock speed 200 MHz with TSMC 0.18 mum technology, and that it can be successfully used for image segmentation on an FPGA board with AMBA AHB.