Proposed hardware architectures of particle filter for object tracking

In this article, efficient hardware architectures for particle filter (PF) are presented. We propose three different architectures for Sequential Importance Resampling Filter (SIRF) implementation. The first architecture is a two-step sequential PF machine, where particle sampling, weight, and output calculations are carried out in parallel during the first step followed by sequential resampling in the second step. For the weight computation step, a piecewise linear function is used instead of the classical exponential function. This decreases the complexity of the architecture without degrading the results. The second architecture speeds up the resampling step via a parallel, rather than a serial, architecture. This second architecture targets a balance between hardware resources and the speed of operation. The third architecture implements the SIRF as a distributed PF composed of several processing elements and central unit. All the proposed architectures are captured using VHDL synthesized using Xilinx environment, and verified using the ModelSim simulator. Synthesis results confirmed the resource reduction and speed up advantages of our architectures.