FPGA-based Smart Camera for 3D wavelet-based image segmentation

In recent years hardware implementation of the wavelet transform for image processing has gathered significant attention. The wavelet transform is a promising tool for image processing and in particular for image compression and image segmentation. In this paper the 3D wavelet transform is used to detect moving objects or object groups as regions of interest (ROI). We propose a hardware implementation of the 2D wavelet transform, including PAL/NTSC video grabbing and Ethernet interface. It requires a low density FPGA board like V2PRO, while the 3D wavelet transform needs slightly more internal memory. Careful selection of those subbands which contain important coefficients reduces the computing power and memory requirements for video segmentation and movement detection. In addition, using the ROI mask the network transfer rate can be reduced significantly. The design is called smart camera because it delivers processed images instead of original ones.