An FPGA softcore based implementation of a bird call recognition system for sensor networks

To investigate the on-sensor processing capabilities of FPGAs, this paper presents a bird call recognition system based on linear predictive cepstral coefficients (LPCC) and dynamic time warping (DTW) algorithms for sensor network applications, and compares two different implementations on a Xilinx Spartan-3E FPGA with MicroBlaze soft processor. The experimental results show that compared to the software-only solution, the software / hardware (SW/HW) implementation with hardware coprocessor for DTW yields significant performance improvement by the factor of 13.8 and 33.4 respectively for two example inputs, and achieves about 31.1 times energy efficiency by using only 7.5% more power.