Abstract
Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) algorithm is a very excellent approach for feature detection. It is characterized by data intensive computation. The current studies of accelerating SIFT algorithm are mainly reflected in three aspects: optimizing the parallel parts of the algorithm based on general-purpose multi-core processors, designing the customized multi-core processor dedicated for SIFT, and implementing it based on the FPGA platform. The real-time performance of SIFT has been highly improved. However, the factors such as the input image size, the number of octaves and scale factors in the SIFT algorithm are restricted for some solutions, the flexibility that ensures the high execution performance under variable factors should be improved. This paper proposes a reconfigurable solution to solve this problem. We fully exploit the algorithm and adopt several techniques, such as full parallel execution, block computation and CORDIC transformation, etc., to improve the execution efficiency on a REconfigurable MUltimedia System called REMUS. Experimental results show that the execution performance of the SIFT is improved by 33%, 50% and 8 times comparing with that executed in the multi-core platform, FPGA and ASIC separately. The scheme of dynamic reconfiguration in this work can configure the circuits to meet the computation requirements under different input image size, different number of octaves and scale factors in the process of computing.