Supporting Utilities for Heterogeneous Embedded Image Processing Platforms (STHEM): An Overview

Abstract

The TULIPP project aims to simplify development of embedded vision applications with low-power and real-time requirements by providing a complete image processing system package called the TULIPP Starter Kit. To achieve this, the chosen high-performance embedded vision platform needs to be extended with performance analysis and power measurement features. The lack of such features plagues most embedded vision platforms in general and practitioners have adopted adhoc methods to circumvent the problem. In this paper, we describe four generic utilities that complement and refine the capabilities of existing platforms for embedded vision applications. Concretely, we describe a novel power measurement and analysis utility, a platform-optimized image processing library, a dynamic partial reconfiguration utility, and an utility providing support for using the real-time OS HIPPEROS within Xilinx SDSoC. Collectively, these utilities enable efficient development of image processing applications on the TULIPP hardware platform. In future work, we will evaluate the relative benefit of these utilities on key embedded image processing metrics such as frame rate and power consumption.