Computer Vision on FPGAs: Design Methodology and its Application to Gesture Recognition

In this paper we develop a design methodology for generating efficient, target specific Hardware Description Language (HDL) code from an algorithm through the use of coarse-grain reconfigurable dataflow graphs as a representation to guide the designer. We demonstrate this methodology through an algorithm for gesture recognition that has been developed previously in software [9]. Using the recently introduced modeling technique of homogeneous parameterized dataflow (HPDF) [3], which effectively captures the structure of an important class of computer vision applications, we systematically transform the gesture recognition application into a streamlined HDL implementation, which is based on Verilog and VHDL. To demonstrate the utility and efficiency of our approach we synthesize the HDL implementation on the Xilinx Virtex II FPGA. This paper describes our design methodology based on the HPDF representation, which offers useful properties in terms of verifying correctness and exposing performance- enhancing transformations; discusses various challenges that we addressed in efficiently linking the HPDFbased application representation to target-specific HDL code; and provides experimental results pertaining to the mapping of the gesture recognition application onto the Virtex II using our methodology.