Smart camera based on reconfigurable hardware enables diverse real-time applications

We demonstrate the use of a "smart camera " to accelerate two very different image processing applications. The smart camera consists of a high quality video camera and frame grabber connected directly to an FPGA processing board. The advantages of this setup include minimizing the movement of large datasets and minimizing the latency by starting to process data before a complete frame has been acquired. The two applications, one from the area of medical image processing and the other from computational fluid dynamics both exhibit speedups of more than 20 times over software implementations on a 1.5 GHz PC. This smart camera setup is enabling image processing implementations that have not, before now, been achievable in real time.