A Library of Memory Controllers for an Image Processing Prototyping System

Memory organization has proven to be a key point when implementing image processing (IP) algorithms due to the changes in data formats along the process. The latency produced by memory access is in most cases responsible for the fail in achieving the temporal requirements of real-time processing. In this paper we review the different memory organizations in real-word real-time image processing systems, and introduce a library of memory controllers designed to optimize memory access in a system devoted to prototyping these kind of applications. This system was designed to be embedded in a PCI-based computer and has an architecture specially designed to give support to a wide number of processing schemes, allowing the user to store images in its distributed local memory with different organizations. Our library of controllers allows users to optimize memory access for specific image sizes and pixel resolutions, and to store data in different organizations.