Proposition and evaluation of a real-time generic architecture for a laser stripe detection system on FPGA

Laser triangulation applications are commonly used for industrial quality control. Such algorithms require real-time systems often made of a computing unit close to the image sensor through a short and fast link. Choosing a camera with integrated Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) as the computing unit can provide high pipeline and parallel computing adapted to process image in real-time. Moreover, it is necessary in the industry to maintain code for several years whatever the system upgrade. So the conceived operators should be flexible to adapt to any hardware changes (sensor or FPGA) or any tool update with minimum effort. The purpose of this article is to present a generic architecture for laser stripe detection based on the centroid algorithm for a FPGA-based system. Evaluation of the use of resources with respect to two parameters (image width and parallelism) is pointed out. With three syntheses, models have been extracted to forecast evolution of these resources and an error analysis have been conducted to validate these models.