The Image Forest Transform Architecture

The image foresting transform (IFT) is e a generic technique that uses simple variations of the same core algorithm to construct many image processing operators like watershed transforms, edge tracking, geodesic paths, among others. In this paper we propose the silicon IFT (SIFT), an FPGA-based architecture that leverages on the IFT flexibility to build a fast image processing architecture capable of implementing IFT operators in hardware. Our experiments have shown that SIFT can reach speedups of 5600 upon the correspondent software implementation. Moreover, they exhibit excellent execution times as compared to recent dedicated image processing architectures.