Heterogeneity exploration for multiple 2D filter designs

Many image processing applications require fast convolution of an image with a set of large 2D filters. Field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are often used to achieve this goal due to their fine grain parallelism and reconfigurability. This paper presents a novel algorithm for the class of designs that implement a convolution with a set of 2D filters. Firstly, it explores the heterogeneous nature of modern reconfigurable devices using a singular value decomposition based algorithm, which orders the coefficients according to their impact to the filters´ approximation. Secondly, it exploits any redundancy that exists within each filter and between different filters in the set, leading to designs with minimized area. Experiments with real filter sets from computer vision applications demonstrate up to 60% reduction in the required area.