Toward low-cost real-time EPLD-based machine vision workstations and target systems

The two most common approaches to image processing today are software-based systems which are flexible but very slow unless run on very expensive computer hardware and systems using special purpose hardware which can be very fast but are typically very inflexible and fairly expensive. This paper presents an intermediate approach: The use of inexpensive electronically-programmable logic devices (EPLDs) in appropriate architectures to do a wide range of image processing operations thereby providing both the speed of hardware-based systems and most of the flexibility of softwarebased systems. Since EPLDs can be reprogrammed quickly (from associated ROMs) a sequence of operations can be performed in near-real-time by loading a sequence of EPLD configuration files one after another. This paper illustrates these ideas by showing the internal programming needed for many common image processing operations as well as appropriate system architectures.