Rajesh Mahapatra, Engineering Manager at Analog Devices, presents the "Multiple Uses of Pipelined Video Pre-Processor Hardware in Vision Applications" tutorial at the May 2014 Embedded Vision Summit.
Significant resemblance and overlap exist among the pre-processing blocks of different vision applications. For instance, image gradients and edges have proven beneficial for a variety of applications, such as face detection, traffic sign recognition, and fault detection. What if such pre-processing was available "for free" to vision developers, as a built-in hardware feature with a compute pipelining mechanism?
In this presentation, Mahapatra illustrates how edge detection as a pre-processing tool can be used effectively to reduce the computational cost of vision applications, enabling low-power implementations. Analog Devices' examples include the detection of faces, traffic speed limit signs and irises, demonstrating a significant reduction in programmable DSP loading.