Feature Detection on FPGA

 

Autonomous landing and roving on the Moon require fast computation. Space tolerant processors are insufficient for processing computer vision algorithms to land safely on the surface of the Moon. Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are capable of parallelizing the computations that a processor executes serially. An FPGA programmer has the ability of directly programming the logic fabric of the board. A processor is restricted to a set of assembly commands which it fetches, decodes, and executes in order to run a program. The video above executes several blurs on FPGA. Blurring is required for the Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) feature detection algorithm that is currently being developed.