Using Reconfigurable Computers for DSP Image Processing

Reconfigurable computers (RCs) are those parallel systems that are designed around multiple general-purpose processors and multiple field programmable gate array (FPGA) chips. These systems can leverage the synergism between conventional processors and FPGAs to provide low-level hardware functionality at the same level of programmability as general-purpose computers. RCs have proposed very high processing capabilities for computationally intensive applications such as Image Processing. This is due to the inherently parallel operation paradigm of the FPGA hardware. In this paper we present the design and implementation of image processing kernels for RCs. This library of kernels have been tested and verified for performance on one of the state-of-the-art reconfigurable computers, SRC-6E. This paper shows that RCs are between 8 to 400 times faster than comparable Pentiums for image based tasks.