Image Processing Using Reconfigurable Hardware

FPGA based hardware accelerators have become more and more important for bioinformatics applications. These applications use wide range of algorithms, including searches in large databases, sequence alignment, statistical analysis and image processing. A part of these algorithms can be efficiently accelerated using FPGA devices. Biological and biomedical experiments like microarray experiments [1], high-content screening (HCS) or cellular microscopy [2] result in large amount of image data. These data have to be processed to evaluate the experiments. There are different applications available for this purpose, for example the CellProfiler [3], which can process and analyze cellular microscopy images. The final goal would be an FPGA based hardware accelerator for (biomedical) image processing purposes. This would include several reconfigurable execution units, which would enable the parallel processing of the data. By using partial dynamic reconfiguration [4], the execution units could be quickly reconfigured with the necessary algorithms. This paper introduces a reconfigurable test system and two basic image processing functions implemented with FPGA. These functions are a 3 x 3 median filter and a 3 x 3 FIR filter, which can process 8 bit grayscale images.