Fast and Efficient FPGA-based Feature Detection employing the SURF algorithm

Feature detectors are schemes that locate and describe points or regions of 'interest' in an image. Today there are numerous machine vision applications needing efficient feature detectors that can work on Real-time; moreover, since this detection is one of the most time consuming tasks in several vision devices, the speed of the feature detection schemes severally affects the effectiveness of the complete systems. As a result, feature detectors are increasingly being implemented in state-of-the-art FPGAs. This paper describes an FPGA-based implementation of the SURF (Speeded-Up Robust Features) detector introduced by Bay, Ess, Tuytelaars and Van Gool; this algorithm is considered to be the most efficient feature detector algorithm available. Moreover, this is, to the best of our knowledge, the first implementation of this scheme in an FPGA. Our innovative system can support processing of standard video (640 x 480 pixels) at up to 56 frames per second while it outperforms a state-of-the-art dual-core Intel CPU by at least 8 times. Moreover, the proposed system, which is clocked at 200MHz and consumes less than 20W, supports constantly a frame rate only 20% lower than the peak rate of a high-end GPU executing the same basic algorithm; the specified GPU consists of 128 floating point CPUs, clocked at 1.35GHz and consumes more than 200W.