An FPGA Based Software/Hardware Codesign for Real Time Video Processing : A Video Interface Software and Contrast Enhancement Hardware Codesign Implementation using Xilinx Virtex II Pro FPGA

Sammanfattning: Xilinx Virtex II Pro FPGA with integrated PowerPC core offers an opportunity to implementing a software and hardware codesign. The software application executes on the PowerPC processor while the FPGA implementation of hardware cores coprocess with PowerPC to achieve the goals of acceleration. Another benefit of coprocessing with the hardware acceleration core is the release of processor load. This thesis demonstrates such an FPGA based software and hardware codesign by implementing a real time video processing project on Xilinx ML310 development platform which is featured with a Xilinx Virtex II Pro FPGA. The software part in this project performs video and memory interface task which includes image capture from camera, the store of image into on-board memory, and the display of image on a screen. The hardware coprocessing core does a contrast enhancement function on the input image. To ease the software development and make this project flexible for future extension, an Embedded Operating System MontaVista Linux is installed on the ML310 platform. Thus the software video interface application is developed using Linux programming method, for example the use of Video4Linux API. The last but not the least implementation topic is the software and hardware interface, which is the Linux device driver for the hardware core. This thesis report presents all the above topics of Operating System installation, video interface software development, contrast enhancement hardware implementation, and hardware core’s Linux device driver programming. After this, a measurement result is presented to show the performance of hardware acceleration and processor load reduction, by comparing to the results from a software implementation of the same contrast enhancement function. This is followed by a discussion chapter, including the performance analysis, current design’s limitations and proposals for improvements. This report is ended with an outlook from this master thesis.