Pattern Compression of FAST Corner Detection for Efficient Hardware Implementation

This paper shows stream-oriented FPGA implementation of the machine-learned Features from Accelerated Segment Test (FAST) corner detection, which is used in the parallel tracking and mapping (PTAM) for augmented reality (AR). One of the difficulties of compact hardware implementation of the FAST corner detection is a matching process with a large number of corner patterns. We propose corner pattern compression methods focusing on discriminant division and pattern symmetry for rotation and inversion. This pattern compression enables implementation of the corner pattern matching with a combinational circuit. Our prototype implementation achieves real-time execution performance with 7-9% of available slices of a Virtex-5 FPGA.

[1]  J. Ross Quinlan,et al.  Induction of Decision Trees , 1986, Machine Learning.

[2]  Tom Drummond,et al.  Fusing points and lines for high performance tracking , 2005, Tenth IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV'05) Volume 1.

[3]  Tom Drummond,et al.  Machine Learning for High-Speed Corner Detection , 2006, ECCV.

[4]  Adam Schmidt,et al.  High-Speed Image Feature Detection Using FPGA Implementation of Fast Algorithm , 2008, VISAPP.

[5]  César Torres-Huitzil,et al.  An FPGA architecture for high speed edge and corner detection , 2000, Proceedings Fifth IEEE International Workshop on Computer Architectures for Machine Perception.

[6]  Stephen M. Smith,et al.  SUSAN—A New Approach to Low Level Image Processing , 1997, International Journal of Computer Vision.

[7]  Walter Stechele,et al.  Optimizing the SUSAN corner detection algorithm for a high speed FPGA implementation , 2009, 2009 International Conference on Field Programmable Logic and Applications.

[8]  W. James MacLean,et al.  A Proposed Pipelined-Architecture for FPGA-Based Affine-Invariant Feature Detectors , 2006, 2006 Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshop (CVPRW'06).

[9]  Christopher G. Harris,et al.  A Combined Corner and Edge Detector , 1988, Alvey Vision Conference.

[10]  G. Klein,et al.  Parallel Tracking and Mapping for Small AR Workspaces , 2007, 2007 6th IEEE and ACM International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality.