DESIGN AND FPGA IMPLEMENTATION OF AN ADAPTIVE VIDEO SUBSAMPLING ALGORITHM FOR ENERGY-EFFICIENT SINGLE OBJECT TRACKING

Image sensors with programmable region-of-interest (ROI) readout are a new sensing technology important for energy-efficient embedded computer vision. In particular, ROIs can subsample the number of pixels being readout while performing single object tracking in a video. In this paper, we develop adaptive sampling algorithms which perform joint object tracking and predictive video subsampling. We utilize an object detection consisting of either mean shift tracking or a neural network, coupled with a Kalman filter for prediction. We show that our algorithms achieve mean average precision of 0.70 or higher on a dataset of 20 videos in software. Further, we implement hardware acceleration of mean shift tracking with Kalman filter adaptive subsampling on an FPGA. Hardware results show a 23x improvement in clock cycles and latency as compared to baseline methods and achieves 38FPS real-time performance. This research points to a new domain of hardware-software co-design for adaptive video subsampling in embedded computer vision.