A Vocabulary Forest Object Matching Processor With 2.07 M-Vector/s Throughput and 13.3 nJ/Vector Per-Vector Energy for Full-HD 60 fps Video Object Recognition

Approximate nearest neighbor searching has been studied as the keypoint matching algorithm for object recognition systems, and its hardware realization has reduced the external memory access which is the main bottleneck in object recognition process. However, external memory access reduction alone cannot satisfy the ever-increasing memory bandwidth requirement due to the rapid increase of the image resolution and frame rate of many recent applications such as advanced driver assistance system. In this paper, vocabulary forest (VF) processor is proposed that achieves both high accuracy and high speed by integrating on-chip database (DB) to remove external memory access. The area-efficient reusable-vocabulary tree architecture is proposed to reduce area, and the propagate-and-compute-array architecture is proposed to enhance the processing speed of the VF. The proposed VF processor can speed up the object matching stage by 16.4x compared with the state-of-the-art matching processor [Hong et al., Symp. VLSIC, 2013] for high resolution (Full-HD) and real-time (60 fps) video object recognition. It is fabricated using 65 nm CMOS technology and integrated into an object recognition SoC. The proposed VF chip achieves 2.07 M-vector/s throughput and 13.3 nJ/vector per-vector energy with 95.7% matching accuracy for 100 objects.