Abstract

In this paper, we present a distributed Canny edge detection algorithm that results in significantly reduced memory requirements decreased latency and increased throughput with no loss in edge detection performance as compared to the original Canny algorithm. The new algorithm uses a low-complexity 8-bin non-uniform gradient magnitude histogram to compute block-based hysteresis thresholds that are used by the Canny edge detector. Furthermore, FPGAbased hardware architecture of our proposed algorithm is presented in this paper and the architecture is synthesized on the Xilinx Virtex 4 FPGA. The design development is done in VHDL and simulates the results in modelsim 6.3 using Xilinx 12.2. Keywords: Canny Edge detector, Distributed Processing, Non-uniform quantization, FPGA.