Hardware-Software Codesign for Geological Image Processing

In this paper, an integrated hardware-software platform is proposed to process geological images. This platform is versatile as it is configurable at run time. It also provides high-speed and low power consumption performances. The concept is illustrated by a prototype system for geological image registration. The FPGA is configured at run time to perform fast Fourier transform. The software part running on a microprocessor inside the same FPGA. The results show that complex geoscience imaging processing tasks are feasible on a small FPGA chip and suitable for on-board applications in an airplane. This complete hardware/software prototype can also be easily integrated as a part of a large PC-FPGA geological image processing system. To the knowledge of the authors, it is the first attempt to use hardware-software codesign approach for geological image processing, which will have significant impact for related applications.