Feature extraction of Digital Aerial Images by FPGA based implementation of edge detection algorithms

Edge of image is one of the most fundamental and significant features. Edge detection is always one of the classical studying projects of computer vision and image processing field. It is the first step of image analysis and understanding. With the continuous improvement of remote sensing image, especially the appearance of Digital Aerial Image, edge detection is necessary step to extract information from the Digital Aerial images..The purpose of edge detection is to discover the information about the shapes and the reflectance or transmittance in an image. The correctness and reliability of its results affect directly the comprehension machine system made for objective world. In this paper FPGA-based architecture for edge detection algorithms has been proposed. The implementation of edge detection algorithms on a field programmable gate array (FPGA) is having advantage of using large memory and embedded multipliers. FPGAs are providing a platform for processing real time algorithms on application-specific hardware with substantially higher performance than programmable digital signal processors (DSPs). The proposed architecture can be used as a building block of a aerial imaging systems for navigation and for the pattern recognition. The hardware implementation results are presented for the Sobel and Prewitt operator.