FPGA implementation of ROI extraction for visual-IR smart cameras

Sammanfattning: Video surveillance systems have been popular as a security tool for years, and the technological development helps monitoring accident-prone areas with the help of digital image processing.A thermal and a visual camera are being used in the surveillance project. The thermal camera is sensitive to the heat emitted by objects, and it is essential to employ the thermal camera as the visual camera is only useful in the presence of light. These cameras do not provide images of the same resolution. In order to extract the region of interest (ROI) of the visual camera, the images of these cameras need to have the same resolution; therefore the thermal images are processed in order to have the same size as the visual image.The ROI extraction is needed in order to reduce the data that needs to be transmitted. The region of interest is extracted from the visual image and the required processes are mostly done on the thermal image as it has lower resolution and therefore requires less computational processing. The image taken from the thermal camera is up scaled by using the nearest neighbor algorithm and it is zero-padded to make the resolutions of the two images equal, and then the region of interest is extracted by masking the result with the related converted version of visual image to YCbCr color space.