Object detection in embedded systems is important for many contemporary applications that involve vision and scene analysis. In this paper, we propose a novel architecture for object detection implemented in FPGA, based on the Stripe Memory Engine (SME), and point out shortcomings of existing architectures. SME processes a stream of image data so that it stores a narrow stripe of the input image and its scaled versions and uses a detector unit which is efficiently pipelined across multiple image positions within the SME. We show how to process images with up to 4K resolution at high frame rates using cascades of SMEs. As a detector algorithm, the SMEs use boosted soft cascade with simple image features that require only pixel comparisons and look-up tables; therefore, they are well suitable for hardware implemenation. We describe the components of our architecture and compare it to several published works in several configurations. As an example, we implemented face detection and license plate detection applications that work with HD images (1280 ×720 pixels) running at over 60 frames/s on Xilinx Zynq platform. We analyzed their power consumption, evaluated the accuracy of our detectors, and compared them to Haar Cascades from OpenCV that are often used by other authors. We show that our detectors offer better accuracy as well as performance at lower power consumption.

Object detection is one of the key tasks in computer vision. It is computationally intensive and it is reasonable to accelerate it in hardware. The possible benefits of the acceleration are reduction of the computational load of the host computer system, increase of the overall performance of the applications, and reduction of the power consumption. We present novel architecture for multi-scale object detection in video streams. The architecture uses scanning window classifiers produced by WaldBoost learning algorithm, and simple image features. It employs small image buffer for data under processing, and on-the-fly scaling units to enable detection of object in multiple scales. The whole processing chain is pipelined and thus more image windows are processed in parallel. We implemented the engine in Spartan 6 FPGA and we show that it can process 640x480 pixel video streams at over 160 frames per second without the need of external memory. The design takes only a fraction of resources, compared to similar state of the art approaches.

In this paper, we introduce a novel architecture of an engine for high performance multi-scale detection of objects in videos based on WaldBoost training algorithm. The key properties of the architecture include processing of streamed data and low resource consumption. We implemented the engine in FPGA and we show that it can process 640×480 pixel video streams at over 160 fps without the need of external memory. We evaluate the design on the face detection task, compare it to state of the art designs, and discuss its features and limitations.

Summary form only given. In this demo, we introduce a novel architecture of an engine for high performance multi-scale detection of objects in videos based on WaldBoost training algorithm. The key properties of the architecture include processing of streamed data and low resource consumption. We implemented the engine in FPGA and we show that it can process 640 × 480 pixel video streams at over 160 FPS without the need of external memory.