Real-time Sky-detection Implementation

Working Tomorrow / Business Unit Technical Software Engineering Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science CE-MS-2006-04 Currently emerging flat plasma and LCD television sets, provide a higher resolution and better color quality than the conventional CRT TVs. To fully utilize the capabilities of these displays, Standard Definition video material need to be enhanced in the TV set. In this enhancement process, existing noise can become more clearly visible, or additional artifacts can be introduced to the video image. Noise and artifacts are subjectively more objectionable in smooth areas. This motivates developing techniques for removal of these imperfections in commonly seen uniformly colored areas, such as sky regions. In this thesis, we have analysed a sky-detection algorithm and have set up requirements for a pixel-accurate, temporally-consistent real-time implementation of this algorithm. We selected an appropriate hardware platform, and designed an architecture that meets the mentioned requirements. This architecture was implemented on the platform, and was validated for real-time operation. We also compared the performance of our hardware implementation against its software counterpart and we have realized a hardware speedup of 3.40. An experiment with the hardware implementation using a camera demonstrated that an image of up to 640x480 at a frame rate of 30 fps can be processed in real-time. Furthermore, according to our calculation, with minor modifications it must be feasible to process images with a pixel rate of up to 142 MHz by our system. This makes the proposed method potentially suitable for High Definition TV material. version date changes author review 0.1 2006-06-15 first draft TQ MP 0.2 2006-06-30 review updates MP TQ EV 0.3 2006-07-13 review updates EV TQ – 0.4 2006-07-18 architecture and some design considerations added TQ ER 0.5 2006-07-31 finished chapter 5, chapter 6 and 7 and incorporated review update ER TQ BZ 0.6 2006-08-03 rewritten chapter 2, 5 and 6 for BZ’s comments TQ – 1.