Streaming Data Movement for Real-Time Image Analysis

High performance portable systems for real-time video/image analysis continue to demand high processing power and memory bandwidth. In embedded systems such as digital still cameras, camcorders, and camera phones, the expected performance must be delivered while meeting size, weight, and power constraints. A well-designed system should include analyses of its memory subsystem as well as the computation platform. This paper focuses on a streaming memory subsystem that leverages deterministic memory access patterns. We formalize the notion of stream descriptors as a means to define these stream access patterns and to improve memory access efficiencies by discovering locality between different data streams. Data movement for a real-time image analysis applications are performed, showing favorable bandwidth savings using stream descriptors.