A Framework to the Design and Programming of Many-Core Focal-Plane Vision Processors

Abstract

The Focal-Plane Image Processing area aims to bring processing elements as near as possible to the pixels and to the camera's focal-plane. Most of the works reported in the literature uses only simple processing elements, in general analog ones, with few flexibility. With the technology advances, a new generation of Vision Processors is emerging. It is expected that multi/many-core systems will be integrated to the pixel sensors, offering several opportunities for parallelism exploration, resulting in high performance and flexible processing systems. The programmability is one of the main problems in this area, since most programmers are not able to create parallel algorithms and applications. In this work, we propose a methodology to the design and programming of many-core focal-plane vision processors. The application is described using a Domain Specific Language, from which the parallelism characteristics are extracted. Afterwards, a new abstract model is derived using techniques such as Program Slicing (PS) and Task-Graph Clustering (TGC). The abstract model is then transformed in a SystemC/TLM2.0 description, in order to allow for different timing accuracy simulations. The results of the simulations are used together with an ASIP design tool in order to determine both the microarchitecture of processing elements and the communication structure of the new system. Finally, from the model derived before, a new source code is generated and programmed into the new platform. In this context, the main concepts and ideas are described in this work, as well as some partial results.