FPGA Central

Hey,
Why FPGA based face recognition? MATLAB is fine too right. Is it for
the Power or Reconfigurability or .. ?

Cheers

[email protected] wrote:
> Hey,
> Why FPGA based face recognition? MATLAB is fine too right. Is it for
> the Power or Reconfigurability or .. ?
>
> Cheers

For an application like Face Recognition, FPGAs would often be used
because of the speed of parallelism afforded by the ability to tailor
the logic to the task.

The next faster step in speed but much faster in development is a DSP
based approach, allowing the high algorithmic speed with the ease of
higher level software languages.

The slower option is to use a generic PC running software designed to
accommodate a huge breadth of numerical processing such as MATLAB.

But isn't MATLAB much slower and less effective than a human observer?

Different applications call for different needs. A human observer
can't recognize faces from an enormous database. An FPGA takes a long
development time for such a high-level algorithm to get the speed into
the system.

On 6 nov, 18:30, John_H <[email protected]> wrote:
> [email protected] wrote:
> > Hey,
> > Why FPGA based face recognition? MATLAB is fine too right. Is it for
> > the Power or Reconfigurability or .. ?
>
> > Cheers
>
> For an application like Face Recognition, FPGAs would often be used
> because of the speed of parallelism afforded by the ability to tailor
> the logic to the task.
>
> The next faster step in speed but much faster in development is a DSP
> based approach, allowing the high algorithmic speed with the ease of
> higher level software languages.
>
> The slower option is to use a generic PC running software designed to
> accommodate a huge breadth of numerical processing such as MATLAB.
>
> But isn't MATLAB much slower and less effective than a human observer?
>
> Different applications call for different needs. *A human observer
> can't recognize faces from an enormous database. *An FPGA takes a long
> development time for such a high-level algorithm to get the speed into
> the system.

Well I think that designing a face-recognition system in VHDL (or
Verilog) would be a huge waste of time and it would be really hard to
do. There are tools for that, to automate conversion from Matlab to
HDL (AccelDSP, system generator). I'm pretty sure that there are FPGA-
neutral tools too for Matlab (that would work on both Altera and
Xilinx)

> Well I think that designing a face-recognition system in VHDL (or
> Verilog) would be a huge waste of time and it would be really hard to
> do. There are tools for that, to automate conversion from Matlab to
> HDL (AccelDSP, system generator). I'm pretty sure that there are FPGA-
> neutral tools too for Matlab (that would work on both Altera and
> Xilinx)

Such as Synplify DSP, from Synplicity. Supports all major devices
vendors, even ASIC technology.


Francois Choquette

On 7 nov, 18:31, Francois Choquette <[email protected]> wrote:
> > Well I think that designing a face-recognition system in VHDL (or
> > Verilog) would be a huge waste of time and it would be really hard to
> > do. There are tools for that, to automate conversion from Matlab to
> > HDL (AccelDSP, system generator). I'm pretty sure that there are FPGA-
> > neutral tools too for Matlab (that would work on both Altera and
> > Xilinx)
>
> Such as Synplify DSP, from Synplicity. *Supports all major devices
> vendors, even ASIC technology.
>
> Francois Choquette

Yeah but AFAIK, there are still more features in AccelDSP than in
SynplifyDSP. Such as Matrix operations for example. That's probably
overkill for most applications though.