Architectural Study of HOG Feature Extraction Processor for Real-Time Object Detection

This paper describes a Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HOG) feature extraction processor for HDTV resolution video (1920 × 1080 pixels). It features a simplified HOG algorithm with cell-based scanning and simultaneous Support Vector Machine (SVM) calculation, cell-based pipeline architecture, and parallelized modules. To evaluate the effectiveness of our approach, the proposed architecture is implemented onto a FPGA prototyping board. Results show that the proposed architecture can generate HOG features and detect objects with 40 MHz for SVGA resolution video (800 ~ 600 pixels) at 72 frames per second (fps). The proposed schemes are easily expandable to HDTV resolution video at 30 fps with 76.2 MHz if a high-resolution camera and higher operating frequency are available.