EURASIP Journal on Applied Signal Processing 
Volume 2005 (2005), Issue 13, Pages 2026-2042
doi:10.1155/ASP.2005.2026

Cost-Effective Video Filtering Solution for Real-Time Vision Systems

Viktor Fischer,1 Rastislav Lukac,2 and Karl Martin2

 1Laboratoire Traitement du Signal et Instrumentation, Unité Mixte de Recherche CNRS 5516, Université Jean Monnet, 10 rue Barrouin, Saint-Etienne 42000, France
2Multimedia Laboratory, The Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Toronto, 10 King's College Road Toronto, M5S 3G4, ON, Canada
Received 23 December 2003; Revised 12 November 2004

Abstract

This paper presents an efficient video filtering scheme and its implementation in a field-programmable logic device (FPLD). Since the proposed nonlinear, spatiotemporal filtering scheme is based on order statistics, its efficient implementation benefits from a bit-serial realization. The utilization of both the spatial and temporal correlation characteristics of the processed video significantly increases the computational demands on this solution, and thus, implementation becomes a significant challenge. Simulation studies reported in this paper indicate that the proposed pipelined bit-serial FPLD filtering solution can achieve speeds of up to 97.6 Mpixels/s and consumes 1700 to 2700 logic cells for the speed-optimized and area-optimized versions, respectively. Thus, the filter area represents only 6.6 to 10.5% of the Altera STRATIX EP1S25 device available on the Altera Stratix DSP evaluation board, which has been used to implement a prototype of the entire real-time vision system. As such, the proposed adaptive video filtering scheme is both practical and attractive for real-time machine vision and surveillance systems as well as conventional video and multimedia applications.