An FPGA-Based Region-Growing Video Segmentation System with Boundary-Scan-Only LSI Architecture

This paper presents a boundary-scan-only (BSO) video segmentation architecture and its FPGA-based prototype system for 80 times 60 video images (30 fps). In the proposed BSO architecture, an input image is divided into a number of small image blocks. Then only image blocks, that have boundary pixels in the currently grown region, are processed with a block-sized pixel-parallel processing unit. This enables large-sized video segmentation with the compact processing unit, so that FPGA-based real-time video segmentation can be realized. We have developed an evaluation system for 80 times 60 real-time image segmentation with a standard FPGA device in 130 nm CMOS technology, and also evaluated its performance with video images. From this FPGA implementation result, QVGA-sized real-time image segmentation is expected to become possible with a state-of-the-art FPGA device in 90nm CMOS technology