A pipelined array architecture for Euclidean distance transformation and its FPGA implementation

The Euclidean Distance Transform (EDT) is an important tool in image analysis and machine vision. This paper provides an area-efficient hardware solution to the computation of EDT on a binary image. An O(n) hardware algorithm for computing EDT of an n×n image is presented. A pipelined 2D array architecture for harware implementation is designed. The architecture has a regular structure with locally connected identical processing elements. Further, pipelining reduces hardware resources. Such an array architecture is easily scalable to handle images of different sizes and is suitable for implementation on reconfigurable devices like FPGAs. Results of FPGA-based implementation shows that the hardware can process about 6000 images of size 512×512 per second which is much higher than the video rate of 30 frames per second.