| The use of Computer Vision in programmable mobile devices could lead to novel and creative applications. However, the computational demands of Computer Vision are ill-suited to low performance mobile processors. Also the evolving algorithms, due to active research in this field, are ill-suited to dedicated digital circuits. This thesis proposes the inclusion of an FPGA co-processor in smartphones as a means of efficiently computing tasks such as Computer Vision. An open source object detection algorithm is run on a mobile device and implemented on an FPGA to motivate this proposal. Our hardware implementation presents a novel memory architecture and a SIMD processing style that achieves both high performance and energy efficiency. The FPGA implementation outperforms a mobile device by 59 times while being 13.5 times more energy efficient. |
