FPGA Acceleration of Multifunction Printer Image Processing using OpenCL

OpenCL adoption in the High Performance Computing, entertainment and scientific computing markets continues to grow. The flexibility and portability of OpenCL make it an excellent platform upon which to develop image processing applications. However, OpenCL has not yet been applied to the hardcopy printer and Multi-Function Printer, MFP, markets. The printer/MFP markets traditionally use full custom System On Chip, SOC, or ASIC, Application Specific Integrated Circuits, to perform image processing. In this paper we explore the application of OpenCL, in concert with an Altera SOC FPGA, Field Programmable Gate Array, to the core MFP image processing pipeline. The core image processing pipeline operates at a sustained rate of greater than 90 letter-sized pages per minute for a full color RGB, 600DPI, Dots Per Inch, image while simultaneously fitting in a cost effective FPGA device. The OpenCL pipeline provides at least 40x performance improvement compared to a C-based software pipeline running on an embedded CPU and a 5x improvement running on a high end desktop CPU.