An FPGA implementation of k-means clustering for color images based on kd-tree

K-means clustering is a very popular clustering technique, which is used in numerous applications. In the simple k-means clustering algorithm, each point in the dataset is compared with centers of all clusters. This comparison is a very time consuming task, particularly for large dataset and large number of clusters. In order to achieve high performance, we need to filter out clusters which have to be compared with each point efficiently. In this paper, we describe an FPGA implementation of k-means clustering for color images. In our implementation, clusters are filtered out using kd-trees which are dynamically generated on the FPGA in each iteration of k-means clustering. With one XC2V6000, the performance for 512 x 512 and 640 x 480 pixel images (24-bit full color RGB) is more than 30 fps, and 20 - 30 fps for 756 x 512 pixel images in average when dividing to 256 clusters.