Optimal design of a Gabor filter for medical imaging applications

The Gabor filter has gained an important agreement in multimedia processing and visual search applications for its good spatial frequency and position selectivity, notwithstanding its heavy computational load. For these reasons, Gabor filters find useful applications in the processing of medical images, aiming to enhance the original image and to overcome issues related to noise and artifacts. With the purpose to find the optimal design of a Gabor filter to be implemented in ASIC and FPGA platforms, in this work three architectures are presented, representing the best trade-offs for accuracy, area and power constraints. A comparative study among the proposed architectures in terms of allocation of the resources, power dissipation and timing performances is presented, which reveals useful for an informed choice depending on the particular application. The designs have been implemented on a FPGA-based ASIC prototyping system, which returns a maximum operating frequency of 172 MHz for the best case. Synthesis with 90nm CMOS standard cell returns a maximum frequency of 350 MHz. Therefore, the fastest architecture processes 83 and 168 Full-HD (1920×1080 pixels) frames-per-second, respectively for a FPGA and an ASIC implementation, which, to the best of our knowledge, is the current state-of-the-art.