Good FPGA / Micorcontroler development board for real time image processing

Question

I have been working with OpenCV on Desktop environment for the past one year and now I want to shift to dedicated hardware for my real time image processing applications. I have the following questions...

1. which developement boards (FPGA / Microcontroler) are good for implementing image processing algorithms. the image capturing device will be webcam.
2. will I be able to code in C/C++ and convert the code into assembly level and dump it in that developement board?
3. will I be able to use libraries like OpenCV in those image processing algorithms?

since webcams will be used so the following...

1. interface USB 2.0
2. resolution max 640 x 480
3. frame rate 25 - 30 fps
4. depth 8 x 3 for colored image 8 x 1 for gray
5. application: thresholding...gesture recognition..object detection...tracking...optical flow

any kind of suggestion is most welcome...

Answer 1

This is a very broad question, and without knowing what sort of applications you're targeting, the resolution and frame rate of your images, etc. it is very difficult to answer.

FPGA programming for real-time video is a very different animal from software programming using libraries such as OpenCV. It sounds like a good first step for you would be to shift to a single-board computer that offers many of the features of the desktop environment you're used to. There are many inexpensive ARM-based boards out there; perhaps one of the best known right now is the Raspberry Pi.

Answer 2

1. In terms of FPGAs, you would be most concerned with high performance DSP on the chip, for that I would recommend a Xilinx Spartan-6 FPGA or a comparable Altera. Digilent makes some low priced development boards that has USB and VGA that might fit the bill.

2. You will need to program the FPGA with Verilog or VHDL. When programming FPGAs you are describing actual hardware and so it is completely different from coding in C/C++.

3. Unless someone has ported OpenCV to VHDL or Verilog I doubt it.

Answer 3

I think you can be successful with the Avnet ZedBoard with the new Xilinx Zynq XC7Z7020. It runs embedded linux, has the interfaces you require, and since the dual ARM Cortex-A9 processing system is tightly integrated with the FPGA fabric, supports high bandwidth integration of software and memory-mapped hardware accelerators.

It should be straightforward to build and run OpenCV on this board. It is a much steeper learning curve, however, to master the build environment, building your accelerators to speak AXI4 bus interface, etc.

At $300-$400 it is ~10X more expensive than RaspPi but includes the FPGA.

http://zedboard.org

Happy hacking!