Automated target recognition on SPLASH 2

Automated target recognition is an application area that requires special-purpose hardware to achieve reasonable performance. FPGA-based platforms can provide a high level of performance for ATR systems if the implementation can be adapted to the limited FPGA and routing resources of these architectures. The paper discusses a mapping experiment where a linear-systolic implementation of an ATR algorithm is mapped to the SPLASH 2 platform. Simple column oriented processors were used throughout the design to achieve high performance with limited nearest neighbor communication. The distributed SPLASH 2 memories are also exploited to achieve a high degree of parallelism. The resulting design is scalable and can be spread across multiple SPLASH 2 boards with a linear increase in performance.