Hardware Design of Super Resolution on Human Faces for Improving Face Recognition Performance of Intelligent Video Surveillance Systems
Cho-Rong Kim, Yong-Jin Jeong · Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea · 2011
Recently, the rising demand for intelligent video surveillance system leads to high-performance face recognition systems. The solution for low-resolution images acquired by a long-distance camera is required to overcome the distance limits of the existing face recognition systems. For that reason, this paper proposes a hardware design of an image resolution enhancement algorithm for real-time intelligent video surveillance systems. The algorithm is synthesizing a high-resolution face image from an input low-resolution image, with the help of a large collection of other high-resolution face images, called training set. When we checked the performance of the algorithm at 32bit RISC micro-processor, the entire operation took about 25 sec, which is inappropriate for real-time target applications. Based on the result, we implemented the hardware module and verified it using Xilinx Virtex-4 and ARM9-based embedded processor(S3C2440A). The designed hardware can complete the whole operation within 33 msec, so it can deal with 30 frames per second. We expect that the proposed hardware could be one of the solutions not only for real-time processing at the embedded environment, but also for an easy integration with existing face recognition system.