Color segmentation on FPGA using minimum distance classifier for automatic road sign detection

Classification is an important step in machine vision systems; it reveals the true identity of an object using features extracted in pre-processing steps. Practical usage requires the operation to be fast, energy efficient and easy to implement. In this paper, we present a design of minimum distance classifier based on FPGA platform. It is optimized by the pipelined structure to strike a balance between the device utilization and computational speed. In addition, the dimension of the feature space is modeled as generic parameter, making it possible for the design to re-generate hardware to cope with feature space with arbitrary dimensions. Its primary application is demonstrated on color segmentation on FPGA in the form of efficient classification using color as features. This result is further extended by introducing a multi-class component labeling module to label the segmented color components and measure the geometric properties of them. The combination of these two modules can effectively detect road signs as region of interests.