FPGA Implementation of a Stream-Based Real-Time Hardware Line Segment Detector

抄録

Line detection is the fundamental image processing technique which has various applications in the field of computer vision. For example, lane keeping required to realize autonomous vehicles can be implemented based on line detection technique. For such purposes, however, low detection latency and power consumption are essential. Using hardware-based stream processing is considered as an effective way to achieve such properties since it eliminates the need of storing the whole frame into energy-consuming external memory. In addition, adopting FPGAs enables us to keep flexibility of software processing. The line segment detector (LSD) is the algorithm based on intensity gradient, and performs better than the well-known Hough transform in terms of processing speed and accuracy. However, implementing the original LSD on FPGAs as a pipeline structure is difficult mainly because of its iterative region growing approach. Therefore, we propose a simple and stream-friendly line segment detection algorithm based on the concept of LSD. The whole system is implemented on a Xilinx Zynq-7000 XC7Z020-1CLG400C FPGA without any external memory. Evaluation results reveal that the implemented system is able to detect line segments successfully and is compact with 7.5% of Block RAM and less than 7.0% of the other resources used, while maintaining 60 fps throughput for VGA videos. It is also shown that the system is power-efficient compared to software processing on CPUs.