Efficient realtime FPGA implementation of the trace transform

The Trace Transform is a novel image transform that is able to exhibit useful properties such as scale and rotation invariance and occlusion robustness. As a result, it is particularly suited to a variety of classification and recognition tasks including image database search, token registration, activity monitoring, character recognition and face authentication. The main obstacle to the widespread use of the transform is its high computational complexity. This has precluded a detailed investigation of transform parameters. This paper presents an architecture and implementation of a Trace Transform engine on a Virtex-II FPGA. By exploiting the inherent parallelism in the algorithm and the use of optimised functional blocks, a huge performance gain is achieved, exceeding realtime video processing requirements for a 256 x 256 image. © 2006 IEEE.