Real time image processing with reconfigurable hardware

Digital image processing is a very important field within machine vision. Because of it is hard to implement real time image processing operations through software techniques, image processing field is one of the most active areas for reconfigurable computing. This paper introduces a new PCI-based system for real time image processing with reconfigurable hardware. The system uses the HOT2-XL PCI board, and we have implemented a Visual C++ application in order to validate our hardware designs. This environment is based on a library of hardware modules implementing some of the most common operations in image processing. The practical results show that our hardware modules get real time processing, a minimum resource use and a high operation frequency.