Feasibility analysis of ultra high frame rate visual servoing on FPGA and SIMD processor

Visual servoing has been proven to obtain better performance than mechanical encoders for position acquisition. However, the often computationally intensive vision algorithms and the ever growing demands for higher frame rate make its realization very challenging. This work performs a case study on a typical industrial application, organic light emitting diode (OLED) screen printing, and demonstrates the feasibility of achieving ultra high frame rate visual servoing applications on both field programmable gate array (FPGA) and single instruction multiple data (SIMD) processors. We optimize the existing vision processing algorithm and propose a scalable FPGA implementation, which processes a frame within 102 µs. Though a dedicated FPGA implementation is extremely efficient, lack of flexibility and considerable amount of implementation time are two of its clear drawbacks. As an alternative, we propose a reconfigurable wide SIMD processor, which balances among efficiency, flexibility, and implementation effort. For input frames of 120×45 resolution, our SIMD can process a frame within 232 µs, sufficient to provide a throughput of 1000 fps with less than 1 ms latency for the whole vision servoing system. Compared to the reference realization on MicroBlaze, the proposed SIMD processor achieves a 21× performance improvement.