A scalable RC architecture for mean-shift clustering

The mean-shift algorithm provides a unique non-parametric and unsupervised clustering solution to image segmentation and has a proven record of very good performance for a wide variety of input images. It is essential to image processing because it provides the initial and vital steps to numerous object recognition and tracking applications. However, image segmentation using mean-shift clustering is widely recognized as one of the most compute-intensive tasks in image processing, and suffers from poor scalability with respect to the image size (N pixels) and number of iterations (k): O(kN²). Our novel approach focuses on creating a scalable hardware architecture fine-tuned to the computational requirements of the mean-shift clustering algorithm. By efficiently parallelizing and mapping the algorithm to reconfigurable hardware, we can effectively cluster hundreds of pixels independently. Each pixel can benefit from its own dedicated pipeline and can move independently of all other pixels towards its respective cluster. By using our mean-shift FPGA architecture, we achieve a speedup of three orders of magnitude with respect to our software baseline.