Real‐time Image Processing with Very High‐level Synthesis
Chao Li, Souleymane Balla-Arabé, Fan Yang‐Song · 2017
Programming in a high abstraction level can facilitate the development of digital single processing systems. This chapter briefly presents a very high-level synthesis (VHLS) method that allows fast prototyping and verifying the desired FPGA-based image processing in the Matlab environment. It discusses some VHLS implementation issues. Among all the programming languages favored by image processing designers, Matlab is widely used. Matlab allows operator and function polymorphism. The built-in algorithms/functions of Matlab provide users many benefits of facilitating their algorithm specification, but they are usually invisible to a third-party compiler and detected as undefined functions when invoked. The chapter proposes a VHLS method for image processing designs by combining the recent source-to-source compilation and HLS techniques. It provides a very high abstraction level development environment to the users, which can greatly benefit the development productivity by automating the Matlab-to-RTL synthesis process.