Vision Processing with the Canny Edge Detection Reference Design

ID 683433
Date 2/14/2015
Public
Document Table of Contents

1.2. About the Canny Edge Detection Reference Design

The Altera® Canny edge detection reference design targets a Cyclone® V SoC, which contains an Altera Cyclone V FPGA and a dual core ARM® Cortex A9 hard processor system (HPS). This design partitions the Canny edge detection across the FPGA and ARM processor, using the FPGA as a hardware accelerator. The ARM processor runs the software algorithms, which are easier to execute in software than in hardware.

Using the Cyclone V SoC boosts performance and lowers power consumption. The flexibility of the reference design allows you to develop other custom applications around it.

FPGAs offer the most optimal solution. FPGAs use stream-based processing that produces an output pixel as each input pixel arrives. This approach is suitable for common image pre-processing operations such as two dimensional convolution and monochrome conversion. The reference design's custom hardware implementation results in minimal logic utilization and very little on-chip FPGA memory usage, which gives a fast and power-efficient design architecture. The design can chain the stream-based processing blocks together. Internal FPGA voltages for RTL blocks are small as compared to I/O voltages, which gives power savings.