FPGA-based Optical Distortion Correction for Imaging Systems

A novel algorithm for correcting optical spatial distortion in imaging systems is presented, together with the architectures implemented for FPGA-based hardware. Since coordinate transformation functions generally require square root and trigonometric functions, which are not easily calculated using FPGA hardware, the CORDIC (coordinate rotation digital computer) algorithms are employed for these function implementations. An effective pipelined implementation for the radius correction is also demonstrated. The hardware architecture of the spatial correction algorithm has been targeted successfully on a Xilinx Spartan 3 device using the minimum of slices. The experimental results show that the pincushion distortion correction algorithms produce a very low residual error