FPGA implementation of a nonlinear two dimensional fuzzy filter

Nonlinear filtering has found many practical applications in digital signal and image processing. The computation complexity of these filtering algorithms make them difficult for real-time hardware implementation. One of these nonlinear filters, which is based on fuzzy classification of each pixel to subgroups of its neighboring pixels, is considered here for hardware implementation. The criteria of this filter are based on the local context which form the basis of the fuzzy rule. The filtering algorithm is slightly modified for implementation into a Xilinx Virtex series of FPGA for real-time processing of image sequences. Implementation details and recommendations for further improvement are discussed. Result of a simulation example from the proposed hardware implementation is also presented.