Hilal Tayara

A Real-Time Marker-Based Visual Sensor Based on a FPGA and a Soft Core Processor

This paper introduces a real-time marker-based visual sensor architecture for mobile robot localization and navigation. A hardware acceleration architecture for post video processing system was implemented on a field-programmable gate array (FPGA). The pose calculation algorithm was implemented in a System on Chip (SoC) with an Altera Nios II soft-core processor. For every frame, single pass image segmentation and Feature Accelerated Segment Test (FAST) corner detection were used for extracting the predefined markers with known geometries in FPGA. Coplanar PosIT algorithm was implemented on the Nios II soft-core processor supplied with floating point hardware for accelerating floating point operations. Trigonometric functions have been approximated using Taylor series and cubic approximation using Lagrange polynomials. Inverse square root method has been implemented for approximating square root computations. Real time results have been achieved and pixel streams have been processed on the fly without any need to buffer the input frame for further implementation.

Object Detection in Very High-Resolution Aerial Images Using One-Stage Densely Connected Feature Pyramid Network

Object detection in very high-resolution (VHR) aerial images is an essential step for a wide range of applications such as military applications, urban planning, and environmental management. Still, it is a challenging task due to the different scales and appearances of the objects. On the other hand, object detection task in VHR aerial images has improved remarkably in recent years due to the achieved advances in convolution neural networks (CNN). Most of the proposed methods depend on a two-stage approach, namely: a region proposal stage and a classification stage such as Faster R-CNN. Even though two-stage approaches outperform the traditional methods, their optimization is not easy and they are not suitable for real-time applications. In this paper, a uniform one-stage model for object detection in VHR aerial images has been proposed. In order to tackle the challenge of different scales, a densely connected feature pyramid network has been proposed by which high-level multi-scale semantic feature maps with high-quality information are prepared for object detection. This work has been evaluated on two publicly available datasets and outperformed the current state-of-the-art results on both in terms of mean average precision (mAP) and computation time.

Auto PID Tuning of Speed Control of DC Motor Using Particle Swarm Optimization Based on FPGA

This paper introduces auto tuning of proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controllers of DC motor using particle swarm optimization (PSO) method. The DC motor was modeled in Simulink and PSO was implanted on FPGA “cyclone IV E” using the soft processor NIOS II. The results were efficient in reducing the steady state error, settling time, rise time and maximum overshoot in speed control of a DC motor.