Hardware Development of Skylight Estimation Processing in Haze Removing Using High-level Synthesis

Abstract

When monitoring infrastructure by using a drone, the real time advanced image processing on the drone can realize self-flying inspection. This result can reduce the burden of off-line processing to image data captured by the drone and realize quicker and more efficient infra monitoring method. In battery-powered embedded devices such as drones, hardware implementation is effective for realizing lowpower and high-performance image processing. In addition, the high-level synthesis automatically converting the software to the hardware module can handle different kinds of drones and image processing algorithms quickly and flexibly. Considering the aerial image of the drone, it is important to remove haze from the captured image from the viewpoint of noise removal for subsequent advanced image processing. In this paper, we propose a software description method for high-level synthesis in considering of hardware implementation of skylight estimation processing in haze removal processing by Kaiming He et al . In addition, we evaluate the performance of hardware, and show the effect of the proposed method.