FPGA/Python Co-Design for Lane Line Detection on a PYNQ-Z1 Board

Abstract

This paper presents the implementation of lane line detection on FPGA and Python. Lane line detection consists of three functions, median blur, adaptive threshold, and Hough transform. We implemented only accumulation of Hough transform on FPGA. Although the Hough transform cannot be implemented on a low-end FPGA board if implemented directly, by reducing ρθ space, it was successfully implemented on a low-end FPGA board. The rest of the Hough transform was implemented using Python's NumPy and SciPy, and OpenCV. Although it was very easy to write, it did not become a bottleneck for the whole process because of its effectiveness. As a result, we could achieve a 3.9x speedup compared to OpenCV and kept the developing cost down. When implementing median blur and adaptive threshold on an FPGA, we could achieve a 6.34x speedup.