Hardware-Based Sobel Gradient Computations for Sharpness Enhancement

The majority of imaging systems are software based; they require some kind of microprocessor or microcontroller for the imaging algorithms to run. As the speed requirements of imaging and communications systems increase, the need for more hardware-based imaging systems arises. These fully hardware systems solve the fundamental problem inherent in software-based solutions, in which the speed of the algorithms depend on the instruction cycle speed of the processor. Once an algorithm is designed directly on hardware, the speed of the algorithm depends on the system clock frequency and the propagation delays of the logic cells (or standard cells) used in the design, usually measured in nanoseconds per cell. Therefore, such systems no longer depend on any instruction cycle delays, as there is no microprocessor involved. Most modern imaging and communications systems rely on digital signal processing (DSP) to compute complex mathematical operations. The emergence of powerful and low-cost field-programmable gate array (FPGA) devices with hundreds of arithmetic multipliers has enabled the development of many such DSP hardware applications, traditionally implemented only as software solutions.