Evaluation of a segmentation algorithm designed for an FPGA implementation (doi:10.1117/12.2025473)

Abstract

The present work has to be seen in the context of real-time on-board image evaluation of optical satellite data. With on board image evaluation more useful data can be acquired, the time to get requested information can be decreased and new real-time applications are possible. Because of the relative high processing power in comparison to the low power consumption, Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) technology has been chosen as an adequate hardware platform for image processing tasks. One fundamental part for image evaluation is image segmentation. It is a basic tool to extract spatial image information which is very important for many applications such as object detection. Therefore a special segmentation algorithm using the advantages of FPGA technology has been developed. The aim of this work is the evaluation of this algorithm. Segmentation evaluation is a difficult task. The most common way for evaluating the performance of a segmentation method is still subjective evaluation, in which human experts determine the quality of a segmentation. This way is not in compliance with our needs. The evaluation process has to provide a reasonable quality assessment, should be objective, easy to interpret and simple to execute. To reach these requirements a so called Segmentation Accuracy Equality norm (SA EQ) was created, which compares the difference of two segmentation results. It can be shown that this norm is capable as a first quality measurement. Due to its objectivity and simplicity the algorithm has been tested on a specially chosen synthetic test model. In this work the most important results of the quality assessment will be presented.