Real-Time Panoramic Image Mosaic via Harris Corner Detection on FPGA

To solve the problems such as low matching precision, high algorithm complexity and poor real-time in real-time panoramic image mosaic, this paper makes full use of the significance and parallelism of Harris corners as well as the invariance of feature describing methods in light intensity changes, translation and rotation, and proposes a real-time panoramic image mosaic algorithm which uses Harris corner detection and is logically implemented on FPGA. According to the basic features of classical algorithms and the properties of FPGA, several modules like feature point extraction, description and matching are optimized based on the logical implementation of FPGA. The optimized system realizes the high-precision matching in real time. The new algorithm collects images of 256 × 256 pixels by CCD camera on Spartan-6 hardware platform of Xilinx. After going through the algorithm, the mosaic images will finally be output on HD display in the form of DVI. The results show that the new algorithm based on FPGA has high precision, good real-time and robustness.