Hardware Design of Pixel Sorter for Rank Order Filters for Applications in Real-time Systems
Ajay Pratap, Sanjeev Kumar, Dibyayan Das Sharma · 2011
Digital Image Processing (DIP) is a technology that has widespread applications. However, the use of images for different applications requires efficient noise removal, image enhancement and image restoration. Rank order filtering is a non-linear method by which these tasks are accomplished. These filters can remove noise from an image while preserving edge information. Rank order filters work by sorting a window of input pixels and selecting the input with a certain rank as output pixel. In this paper, FPGA based hardware design of an efficient pixel sorter is presented which can be used for rank order filters and implemented in real-time for image processing systems. The hardware has been tested with sample grayscale images and its performance has been evaluated. Lastly, an analysis has been done on the use of the proposed hardware for image based biometric authentication systems.