Evaluation of Data Transfer from FPGA to PC: Increasing Frame Rate by BLOB Detection

This work presents a novel hardware/software codesign approach to blob detection. Camera images are preprocessed on a field-programmable gate array that separates foreground pixels from the background. The foreground pixels are transferred to the PC over a 100 Mbit/s Ethernet interface by using a custom protocol. The PC reconstructs the images from received foreground pixels and extracts centers of masses from every blob in the reconstructed image. Results of evaluation show that under the constraint of 100 Mbit/s the FPGA is able to transmit a large amount of blobs if their number is small enough. The Ethernet interface turns out to be the bottleneck of the overall system.