Hardware/Software Co-Design of an FPGA-based Embedded Tracking System

This paper discusses a practical design experience pertaining to a tracking system employing optical flow. The system was previously extracted from an existing software implementation and modified for FPGA deployment. Details are provided regarding transference of the resulting high-level design to a usable form for FPGA fabrics. Furthermore, discussion is given for obstacles made manifest in embedded vision design and the methods employed for overcoming them. This is attempted with the intent of maintaining a consistent level of vision algorithm performance as well as meeting real-time requirements. The system discussed differs from previous embedded systems employing optical flow in that it consists strictly of fully disclosed nonproprietary transferable components while providing performance measures for power consumption, latency, and area. The system was synthesized onto a Xilinx Virtex-II Pro XC2VP30 FPGA utilizing less than 25% of system resources, performing with a maximum operating frequency of 67MHz without pipelining, and consuming 497mW of power.