A Partitioned CAM Architecture with FPGA Acceleration for Binary Descriptor Matching

An efficient architecture for image descriptor matching that uses a partitioned content-addressable memory (CAM)-based approach is proposed. CAM is frequently used in high-speed content-matching applications. However, due to its lack of functionality to support approximate matching, conventional CAM is not directly useful for image descriptor matching. Our modifications improve the CAM architecture to support approximate content matching for selecting image matches with local binary descriptors. Matches are based on Hamming distances computed for all possible pairs of binary descriptors extracted from two images. We demonstrate an FPGA-based implementation of our CAM-based descriptor matching unit to illustrate the high matching speed of our design. The time complexity of our modified CAM method for binary descriptor matching is O(n). Our method performs binary descriptor matching at a rate of one descriptor per clock cycle at a frequency of 102 MHz. The resource utilization and timing metrics of several experiments are reported to demonstrate the efficacy and scalability of our design.