Modeling and optimization of buffering trade-offs for hardware implementation of image processing applications

As modern image and video processing applications handle increasingly higher image resolutions, the buffering requirements between communicating functional modules increase correspondingly. The performance and cost of these applications can change dramatically depending on the implementation methods for FIFO buffers and the data delivery methods between modules. This paper introduces a new FIFO hardware mapping algorithm based on pointer-based token delivery from dataflow semantics for image and video processing applications. This approach significantly improves the performance of dataflow based implementation of image and video processing systems, and allows effective prediction of changes in performance and buffer memory requirements associated with changes in image resolution. Our pointer-based token delivery method allows indirect token delivery between actors by pointers in conjunction with use of a shared memory. Each pointer references a data block stored in the shared memory. In pointer-based token delivery, a buffer can be configured to be implemented as the combination of a small, fast FIFO and a larger, relatively cheap shared memory while providing an attractive trade-off between performance and hardware cost. We present the complete semantics of our pointer-based modeling method, systematic techniques for mapping representations using these semantics into efficient implementations, and experimental results that demonstrate the performance of the proposed pointer-based techniques.