Parallel Hough Transform-based straight line detection and its FPGA implementation in embedded vision.

Hough Transform has been widely used for straight line detection in low-definition and still images, but it suffers from execution time and resource requirements. Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) provide a competitive alternative for hardware acceleration to reap tremendous computing performance. In this paper, we propose a novel parallel Hough Transform (PHT) and FPGA architecture-associated framework for real-time straight line detection in high-definition videos. A resource-optimized Canny edge detection method with enhanced non-maximum suppression conditions is presented to suppress most possible false edges and obtain more accurate candidate edge pixels for subsequent accelerated computation. Then, a novel PHT algorithm exploiting spatial angle-level parallelism is proposed to upgrade computational accuracy by improving the minimum computational step. Moreover, the FPGA based multi-level pipelined PHT architecture optimized by spatial parallelism ensures real-time computation for 1,024 × 768 resolution videos without any off-chip memory consumption. This framework is evaluated on ALTERA DE2-115 FPGA evaluation platform at a maximum frequency of 200 MHz, and it can calculate straight line parameters in 15.59 ms on the average for one frame. Qualitative and quantitative evaluation results have validated the system performance regarding data throughput, memory bandwidth, resource, speed and robustness.

Multiscale semilocal interpolation with antialiasing.

Aliasing is a common artifact in low-resolution (LR) images generated by a downsampling process. Recovering the original high-resolution image from its LR counterpart while at the same time removing the aliasing artifacts is a challenging image interpolation problem. Since a natural image normally contains redundant similar patches, the values of missing pixels can be available at texture-relevant LR pixels. Based on this, we propose an iterative multiscale semilocal interpolation method that can effectively address the aliasing problem. The proposed method estimates each missing pixel from a set of texture-relevant semilocal LR pixels with the texture similarity iteratively measured from a sequence of patches of varying sizes. Specifically, in each iteration, top texture-relevant LR pixels are used to construct a data fidelity term in a maximum a posteriori estimation, and a bilateral total variation is used as the regularization term. Experimental results compared with existing interpolation methods demonstrate that our method can not only substantially alleviate the aliasing problem but also produce better results across a wide range of scenes both in terms of quantitative evaluation and subjective visual quality.