Reconfigurable foveated active vision system

Foveal images have variable spatial resolution, enabling a significant reduction in image size and volume. When combined with a high resolution input image, it enables almost instantaneous electronic panning and tilting. This paper proposes an FPGA based foveated imaging system where the spatial resolution may be adjusted from frame to frame. Several Cartesian mapping functions are considered in terms of pixel shape and efficient implementation on an FPGA. It is shown that a 2-pass mapping based on the L_infin distance metric provides the best tradeoffs.