High-speed Target Tracking base on FPGA

Imaging based target tracking by a robotics is an interesting and popular topic. While the high computational power requirement of imaging processing algorithm is still a big limitation, some flying robot like micro aerial vehicles also has a payload limitation, so the high weight computer and GPU is no longer a good choice. This paper present a high speed ball target tracking system based on FPGA. With a CMOS sensor, the original frame can be transfer to the FPGA port. After the video streams go through the parallel image processing core, the color and corner features can be extracted. By comparing with the predefined target's pattern, the target can be detected. AXI bus can transfer the detected target's feature to the ARM core in the ZYNQ device. The PID controller embedded in ARM core can be used to control the Pan-tilt header to move the target to the center of frame.