Hardware accelerator for self adaptive augmented reality systems

The emergency of multimedia applications particularly in mobile embedded systems puts new challenges for the design of such systems. The major difficulty is the embedded system's reduced energy and computational resources that must be carefully used to execute complex application often in unpredictable environments. So the system architecture must be energy efficient and flexible enough to adapt resources to application requirements to manage the environment architectures and mobile's constraints. The augmented reality is a very promising 3D embedded multimedia application. It's based on the addition of specific 3D's animations on a video flow. In this paper, we describe our concept of flexible architecture and we give implementation results based on Pixel Shader Accelerator. This is the first step of the project and we compare various hardware and software implementation.