On February 8th, 2021  at 12:00 am “IRON: Image Registration on FPGAs“, a new appointment of NECST Monday Talk, will be held online via Facebook by Davide Conficconi, PhD student in Information Technology at NECSTLab

Image Registration is a highly compute-intensive optimization procedure that determines the geometric transformation to align a floating image to a reference one. Generally, the registration targets are images taken from different time instances, acquisition angles, and/or sensor types. Several methodologies are employed in the literature to address the limiting factors of this class of algorithms, among which hardware accelerators seem the most promising solution to boost performance. However, most hardware implementations are either closed-source or tailored to a specific context, limiting their application to different fields. For these reasons, we propose an open-source hardware-software framework to generate a configurable architecture for the most compute-intensive part of registration algorithms, namely the similarity metric computation. This metric is the Mutual Information, a well-known calculus from the Information Theory, used in several optimization procedures. Through different design parameters configurations, we explore several design choices of our highly-customizable architecture and validate it on multiple FPGAs. We evaluated various architectures against an optimized Matlab implementation on an Intel Xeon Gold, reaching a speedup up to 2.86x, and remarkable performance and power efficiency against other state-of-the-art approaches.

STREAMING VIA FACEBOOK will be available at the following LINK 

The NECSTLab is a DEIB laboratory, with different research lines on advanced topics in computing systems: from architectural characteristics, to hardware-software codesign methodologies, to security and dependability issues of complex system architectures.

Every week, the “NECST Monday Talk” invites researchers, professionals or entrepreneurs to share their work experiences and projects they are implementing in the “Computing Systems”.