Implementation and Evaluation of Image Processing Algorithms on Reconfigurable Architecture using C-based Hardware Descriptive Languages

With the advent of mobile embedded multimedia devices that are required to perform a range of multimedia tasks, especially image processing tasks, the need to design efficient and high performance image processing systems in a short time-to-market schedule needs to be addressed. Image Processing algorithms implemented in hardware have emerged as the most viable solution for improving the performance of image processing systems. The introduction of reconfigurable devices and system level hardware programming languages has further accelerated the design of image processing in hardware. Most of the system level hardware programming languages introduced and commonly used in the industry are highly hardware specific and requires intermediate to advance hardware knowledge to design and implement the system. In order to overcome this bottleneck various C-based hardware descriptive languages have been proposed over the past decade [25]. These languages have greatly simplified the task of designing and verifying hardware implementation of th