Hardware Design of Moving Object Detection on Reconfigurable System

Moving object detection including background subtraction and morphological processing is a critical research topic for video surveillance because of its high computational loading and power consumption. This paper proposes a hardware design to accelerate the computation of background subtraction with low power consumption. A real-time background subtraction method is designed with a frame-buffer scheme and function partition to improve throughput, and implemented using Verilog HDL on FPGA. The design parallelizes the computations of background update and subtraction with a seven-stage pipeline. A stripe-based morphological processing and accounting for the completion of detected objects is devised. Simulation results for videos of VGA resolutions on a low-end FPGA device show 368 fps throughput for only the real-time background subtraction module, and 51 fps for the whole system, including off-chip memory access. Real-time efficiency with low power consumption and low resource utilization is thus demonstrated.