A Hardware Accelerator for Edge Detection in High-Definition Video using Cellular Neural Networks

This paper presents the architecture of a hardware accelerator for a cellular neural network (CeNN) with an application to real-time edge detection on visible-range and infrared video. The accelerator features fully-pipelined processing elements (PEs) that exploit the data parallelism in the algorithm to perform an iteration of the CeNN on a stream of video data with high throughput. The memory architecture exploits the locality of reference in the CeNN, so that each PE uses only 5 line buffers to store pixel, state, and output data, thus achieving low on-chip memory utilization. Implemented on a Xilinx XC7A200T FPGA running at 245MHz, the accelerator performs edge detection on 1080p video using a single CeNN iteration with a throughput of 118 frames per second (fps), a total latency of 15.7us, and 618mW of power consumption. The architecture features static reconfiguration to store built-in kernels and to add more PEs to support multiple iterations of the CeNN algorithm. More kernels can be added dynamically through a serial interface.