The battle of the giants: a case study of GPU vs FPGA optimisation for real-time image processing

Struyf L., De Beugher S., Van Uytsel D.H., Kanters F., Goedemé T., ''The battle of the giants: a case study of GPU vs FPGA optimisation for real-time image processing'', Proceedings 4th international conference on pervasive and embedded computing and communication systems – PECCS 2014, vol. 1, pp. 112-119, January 7-9, 2014, Lisbon, Portugal.This paper focuses on a thorough comparison of the two main hardware targets for real-time optimization of a computer vision algorithm: GPU and FPGA. Based on a complex case study algorithm for threaded isle detection, implementation on both hardware targets is compared in terms of resulting time performance, code translation effort, hardware cost, power efficiency and integrateability. A real-life case study as described in this paper is a very useful addition to discussions on a more theoretical level, going beyond artificial experiments. In our experiments, we show the speed-up gained by porting our algorithm to FPGA using manually written VHDL and to a heterogeneous GPU/CPU architecture with the OpenCL language. Also, issues and problems occurring during the code porting are detailed.status: publishe