HW/SW co-design platform for image and video processing applications on Virtex-5 FPGA using PICO

Abstract

The objective of this work is to design and implement an Image and Video Processing Platform (IVPP) on FGPAs using PICO based HLS. This hardware/software codesign platform has been implemented on a Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGA. The video interface blocks are done in RTL and the initialization phase is done using a MicroBlaze processor allowing the support of multiple video resolutions. This paper discusses the architectural building blocks showing the flexibility of the proposed platform. This flexibility is achieved by using a new design flow based on PICO. IVPP allows custom-processing blocks to be plugged-in to the platform architecture without modifying the front-end (capturing video data) and back-end (displaying processed output). This paper presents several examples of video processing applications, such as a Canny edge detector, motion detector and object tracking that have been realized using IVPP for real-time video processing.