FPGA Acceleration of Multilevel ORB Feature Extraction for Computer Vision

In this paper, we present the first multilevel implementation of the Harris-Stephens corner detector and the ORB feature extractor running on FPGA hardware, for computer vision and robotics applications. ORB is a fundamental component of many robotics applications, and requires significant computation. The design has been validated both in behavioural simulation and in implementation on an Arria V FPGA connected to a desktop PC via PCI-Express. A Linux kernel-mode driver and userspace library allow integration of the acceleration hardware into C++ programs. The device has significantly higher throughput than a CPU implementation (150 MPixel/s vs 27 MPixel/s) and a GPU implementation (40 MPixel/s), with much lower power draw (5.3 W vs 145 W). This throughput is equivalent to 72 fps at 1920 x 1080 or 488 fps at 640 x 480.