A FPGA design for high speed feature extraction from a compressed measurement stream

A common type of triangulation-based active 3D scanner outputs sets of surface coordinates, called profiles, by extracting the salient features of 2D images formed from an object illuminated by a narrow plane of light. Because a conventional 2D image must be digitized and processed for each profile, current systems do not always provide adequate speed and resolution to meet application demands. To address this challenge, a special purpose image sensor is being developed. Using Compressive Sensing, this sensor will be able to digitize compressed measurements of highly structured images, such as those formed in active 3D scanning, at a rate that would represent the conventional equivalent of 50G pixels/second. It is a significant challenge to process such a high-speed data stream at rates approaching realtime. Therefore, we present a single-chip FPGA design for the extraction of surface profiles from a compressed image stream originating from a 1024 by 768 pixel array at a rate of 14K images per second.