Image Processing Application Development: From Rapid Prototyping to SW/HW Co-simulation and Automated Code Generation

Abstract

Nowadays, the market-place offers quite powerful and low cost reconfigurable hardware devices and a wide range of software tools which find application in the image processing field. However, most of the image processing application designs and their latter deployment on specific hardware devices is still carried out quite costly by hand. This paper presents a new approach to image processing application development, which tackles the historic question of how filling the gap existing between rapid throwaway software designs and final software/hardware implementations. A new graphical component-based tool has been implemented which allows to comprehensively develop this kind of applications, from functional and architectural prototyping stages to software/hardware co-simulation and final code generation. Building this tool has been possible thanks to the synergy that arises from the integration of several of the pre-existent software and hardware image processing libraries and tools.