Electronic – Reading an Image file on FPGA for processing

fpga

I am trying to implement image processing on FPGA. I need to have an image for testing my module. I tested the module for single bit, by just generating a pixel value on test bench, but would want to see the result on a whole image.
Is there a way to load an image file to an fpga for processing?

Best Answer

If you're doing something simple to the image that only involves one pixel at a time (the values of neighboring pixels don't matter), then you might as well do it in software, because the time that it takes is going to be dominated by the I/O, not the processing. The speed of the FPGA has no advantage here.

On the other hand, if you do eventually want to do more complex operations, then the question is too broad to be answered here.

Generally speaking, small to medium range FPGAs do not have enough on-chip memory to store an entire image at once. Anything that requires a "frame buffer" is usually going to require off-chip memory, such as an SDRAM chip, and the on-chip memories will be used as line buffers during the processing.