FPGA Filter Project

Question

Do you guys have any good ideas on FPGA projects involving a filter? I want to do something interesting... not sure what. Thanks ahead of time.

Answer 1

Here's an idea - implement a fast image histogram routine in FPGA. It could just take 8 bit input data and update a 256 bin histogram. You'd also need a way of zeroing the histogram at the start and a way to read the contents of the 256 bins afterwards. This is a potentially useful application as histogramming is a very common operation in image processing and it is inherently bottlenecked on general purpose CPUs due to serial dependencies. It can also not easily be vectorized with SIMD. A fast FPGA implementation would therefore offer real advantages over a software implementation.

Answer 2

I always find image processing projects are great - you can see results on a screen, not just pretty graphs, but actual processed imagery. Get an FPGA board with a camera input and VGA output. Try implementing a Sobel filter first, graduate to a corner detector like Harris or Shi Tomasi after that.

Answer 3

Thanks for the responses... man these are great ideas.

How would one go about implementing a Sobel filter on the FPGA, are there any good resources for that? I was actually trying to look it up, especially if I want to hand write the convolution.

As for the histogram... any good resources for that?