Design and Implementation of Efficient RGB to Gray scale Converter Architectures Using Reversible Logic

Reversible logic is considered to be a major promising alternative to traditional digital logic circuits. It eliminates the possibility of information loss and makes the system run in the backward direction there by allowing the recovery of the inputs from the generated outputs. Converting an image from RGB to gray scale is crucial for majority of the image and video processing applications and also various computer vision applications as they reduce the computational complexity, storage space and increase the system speed. In this paper we have proposed three efficient reversible logic based schemes for the implementation of the color space converter units. We have implemented the RGB to gray scale converter units using three different techniques namely average method, desaturation and luminosity methods. The implementation of the proposed design and its functionality verification was done on XILINX 14.7 ISE and using Verilog HDL. The proposed design finds applications in many of the fields including image processing, video processing and high speed low power digital signal processing applications as well as computer vision applications like face & gesture recognition, object detection, traffic monitoring systems and surveillance systems.