Hardware/software co-design of particle filter and its application in object tracking

This paper presents a hardware/software co-design method for particle filter based on System On Program Chip (SOPC) technique. Considering both the execution speed and design flexibility, we use a NIOS II processor to calculate weight for each particle and a hardware accelerator to update particles. As a result, execution efficiency of the proposed hardware/software co-design method of particle filter is significantly improved while maintaining design flexibility for various applications. To demonstrate the performance of the proposed approach, a real-time object tracking system is established and presented in this paper. Experimental results have demonstrated the proposed method have satisfactory results in real-time tracking of objects in video sequences.