A High-Level Synthesis Implementation and Evaluation of an Image Processing Accelerator

Abstract

Most frequently, an FPGA is used as an implementation platform in applications of graphics processing, as its structure can effectively exploit both spatial and temporal parallelism. Such parallelization techniques involve fundamental restrictions, namely being their dependence on both the processing model and the system’s hardware constraints, that can force the designer to restructure the architecture and the implementation. Predesigned accelerators can significantly assist the designer to solve this problem and meet his deadlines. In this paper, we present our accelerators for Grayscale and Sobel Edge Detection, two of the most fundamental algorithms used in digital image processing projects. We have implemented those algorithms with a “bare-metal” VHDL design, written purely by hand, as a portable USB accelerator device, as well as an HLS-based overlay of a similar implementation designed to be used by a Python interface. The comparisons of the two architectures showcase that the HLS generated design can perform equally to or even better than the handwritten HDL equivalent, especially when the correct compiler directives are provided.

An investigation of performance and power efficiency for parallax background scrolling hardware written in high-level synthesis

“…Therefore, we take advantage of High-level Synthesis, HLS, technology which converts software into hardware automatically and it is a promising technology to reduce hardware design burden. With HLS, hardware development can be executed by just algorithm design and behaviour verification at software level without complicated logic simulation [7][8][9][10].…”

“…We have been developing high-level synthesizable game programming library because this kind of game programming library hasn't existed yet [3][4][5][6]. To use HLS technology efficiently, developers must describe software program considering hardware organization, otherwise HLS tool will generate large-scaled and low-performance hardware [6][7][8][9][10][11][12].…”