An image descriptors extraction hardware-architecture inspired on Human Retina

We present a hardware architecture for the extraction of image feature descriptors, based on a model inspired on the Human Retina. This model comes from an analysis of a recent descriptor extractor, the FREAK (Fast Retina Keypoint) method, which has shown good performance results for different Computer Vision applications. From such analysis we decide the approximations that may be made to the original model so as to accomplish hardware requirements. The goal of our work is to implement FREAK on FPGA (Field-Programmable Gate Array), thinking about the development of future embedded systems. Finally we obtain an IP-core for image descriptor extraction, which can be integrated to a feature detector. We present the synthesis results of our proposed architecture focusing on the resource utilization.