FPGA-based Pipeline Architecture to Transform Cartesian Images into Foveal Images by Using a new Foveation Approach

In Vision systems the image processing represents a bottle neck because the big amount of information that should be analyzed. Working with variant spaces over the visual field has been widely proposed as a way to reduce such information. Foveal vision is one of these proposals by providing a way to transform the visual field obtained with conventional cameras into a sampling with high resolution at the center and decreasing over the periphery such as in mammal vision systems. In this paper, an FPGA based architecture to transform conventional images into foveal images is presented. The hardware algorithm has been taken from new proposal to foveate images. Strategies as parallelism and pipeline are exploited to obtain a high performance and thus, with both of them, reduction in the visual field and the transformation in real time of the digital images into foveal images, a vision system can accelerate its performance and reaches real time restrictions.