A VLSI Centroid Extractor For Real-Time Target Tracking Applications

T. S. Axelrod; T. F. Tassinari; G. O. Barnes; K. Cameron

doi:10.1117/12.962394

6 December 1989 A VLSI Centroid Extractor For Real-Time Target Tracking Applications

T. S. Axelrod, T. F. Tassinari, G. O. Barnes, K. Cameron

Proceedings Volume 1154, Real-Time Signal Processing XII; (1989) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.962394
Event: 33rd Annual Technical Symposium, 1989, San Diego, United States

Abstract

The Automatic Centroid Extractor (ACE) is a CMOS VLSI chip that per-forms target extraction and centroiding functions for an extensible real-time target tracking system. Contiguous pixels whose intensities exceed a given threshold are grouped into separate objects, and three weighted sums of pixel intensities that can rapidly be converted to the target centroid and average intensity are calculated for each object. Proper assignment of contiguous pixels to their respective objects is guaranteed for all convex shapes and most concave shapes. Data for a NxM pixel image is processed in raster scan format with a maximum value of 1024 for N and M. ACE can process in excess of 500 objects per frame and accepts input at up to 20 Megapixels per second. To increase the flexibility of the chip, arbitrary circular regions of the image can be masked so that they do not enter the target extraction process. This allows any set of fixed targets to be ignored if they are not of interest. The chip is a full custom design containing approximately 200,000 transistors and is being fabricated using Hewlett Packard's CMOS40 process. The ACE chip interfaces directly to the Inmos Transputer over a serial link. The communication link is used to select the threshold and to specify the circular regions of the image that will be masked, as well as to transfer target centroids and status information.

Citation Download Citation

T. S. Axelrod, T. F. Tassinari, G. O. Barnes, and K. Cameron "A VLSI Centroid Extractor For Real-Time Target Tracking Applications", Proc. SPIE 1154, Real-Time Signal Processing XII, (6 December 1989); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.962394

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