Optimizing data intensive window-based image processing on reconfigurable hardware boards

Most image processing applications are not only computationally intensive, but also data intensive. Reconfigurable hardware boards provide a convenient and flexible solution to speed up these algorithms. To get a high performance design without going through the time-consuming hardware design process for each different algorithm, we present a simple design flow for window-based image processing applications. By finding the three upper bounds according to area constraints, memory bandwidth constraints and on-chip memory constraints, the block structure of the design which can fully utilized the available resources on the board is determined. A new buffering method is also discussed in this paper to build an efficient memory hierarchy for this type of application.