Single chip video segmentation system with a programmable PE array

Video segmentation is a very important unit in content-based video encoding systems, such as MPEG-4. In this paper, a single chip video segmentation system is proposed. First, a hardware-oriented video segmentation algorithm is developed, which contains only local pixel operations and morphological operations. Simulation results show that the segmentation results of the proposed algorithm are satisfied. To achieve both high throughput and flexibility, the system is then mapped to a hardware architecture with a programmable PE array. This chip is designed with cell-based design flow and is currently under fabrication by TSMC using 0.35μm 1P4M technology. Simulation shows that the prototyping chip can achieve the processing speed of 30 QCIF frames per second and 7,680 binary morphological operations per second at 26MHz with small chip size. This chip can be integrated into any camera or real-time encoding system to support content-based coding capability.