A maximally stable extremal regions system-on-chip for real-time visual surveillance

This paper presents a novel implementation of the Maximally Stable Extremal Regions (MSER) detector on system-on-chip (SoC) using 65 nm CMOS technology. The novel SoC was developed following the Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) design flow which significantly enhanced its realization and fabrication, and overall performances. The SoC has very low area requirement (around 0.05 mm²) and is capable of detecting both bright and dark MSERs in a single run, while computing simultaneously their associated regions´ moments, simplifying its interfacing with other image algorithms (e.g. SIFT and SURF). The novel MSER SoC is power-efficient (requires 2.25 mW) and memory-efficient as it saves more than 31% of the memory space reported in the state-of-the-art MSER implementation on FPGA, making it suitable for mobile devices. With 256×256 resolution and its operating frequency of 133 MHz, the SoC is expected to have a 200 frames/second processing rate, making it suitable (when integrated with other algorithms in the system) for time-critical real-time applications such as visual surveillance.