Implementation of a foveal vision mapping

Foveal vision reduces the data volume by utilising a spatially variant resolution. A high resolution is maintained in the fovea where it can be used by computer vision algorithms, while the resolution is reduced in the periphery where it is less important. This work focuses on the hardware architecture of a system that maps a conventional high resolution uniformly sampled sensor to a variable resolution output. The key feature of the proposed architecture is that it employs a separable forward mapping which requires a small amount of FPGA resources. This enables an efficient implementation of a continuously variable spatial resolution, requiring only 1000 LUTs on a Virtex-5, and runs at 104 MHz, enabling the mapping of a 512 × 512 window at over 300 frames per second.