A brief experience on journey through hardware developments for image processing and its applications on Cryptography

The importance of embedded applications on image and video processing,communication and cryptography domain has been taking a larger space in current research era. Improvement of pictorial information for betterment of human perception like deblurring, de-noising in several fields such as satellite imaging, medical imaging etc are renewed research thrust. Specifically we would like to elaborate our experience on the significance of computer vision as one of the domains where hardware implemented algorithms perform far better than those implemented through software. So far embedded design engineers have successfully implemented their designs by means of Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) and/or Digital Signal Processors (DSP), however with the advancement of VLSI technology a very powerful hardware device namely the Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) combining the key advantages of ASICs and DSPs was developed which have the possibility of reprogramming making them a very attractive device for rapid prototyping.Communication of image and video data in multiple FPGA is no longer far away from the thrust of secured transmission among them, and then the relevance of cryptography is indeed unavoidable. This paper shows how the Xilinx hardware development platform as well Mathworks Matlab can be used to develop hardware based computer vision algorithms and its corresponding crypto transmission channel between multiple FPGA platform from a system level approach, making it favourable for developing a hardware-software co-design environment.