Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Light-weight color image conversion like pencil drawing for high-level synthesized hardware

  • Original Article
  • Published:
Artificial Life and Robotics Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

We are developing pencil-drawing-style image conversion software suitable for high-level synthesis, HLS, technology that automatically converts software into hardware. The pencil-drawing-style image conversion consists of the former and latter processes. The former generates the images expressing edge strengths and their directions. The latter process convolves the line segment corresponding to the edge strength with its direction. As hardware-oriented software description, the medium data across the former and latter processes are optimized. In addition, the former and latter processes are overlapped between the FIFO buffer passing the medium data. The obtained image is still a gray-scaled image. To make it support the color image, this paper inserts a process compositing the original color image with the grayed pencil-drawing-style image to not intervene in the pipelined data path behavior. As a result, an HLS tool used is expected to generate a hardware module with the ideal pipelined data path by one output data/one clock. The experimental results show that the colorization hardware had no significant performance degradation issues for circuit size, run time, or power efficiency compared to the pencil drawing hardware with grayscale. Compared with the software execution, our hardware supporting color image can achieve 4.2 times the performance improvement and 130 times power efficiency.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Fig. 5
Fig. 6
Fig. 7
Fig. 8
Fig. 9
Fig. 10
Fig. 11
Fig. 12
Fig. 13

Similar content being viewed by others

Data availability

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

References

  1. Kumar MPP, Poornima B, Nagendraswamy HS et al (2019) A comprehensive survey on non-photorealistic rendering and benchmark developments for image abstraction and stylization. Iran J Comput Sci 2:131–165

    Article  Google Scholar 

  2. Cewu L, Li X, Jiaya J (2012) Combining sketch and tone for pencil drawing production. In: Proceedings of international symposium on non-photorealistic animation and rendering 2012, pp 65–73

  3. Younes H, Ibrahim A, Rizk M, Valle M (2021) Algorithmic-level approximate tensorial SVM using high-level synthesis on FPGA. Electronics 10(2):205. https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics10020205

    Article  Google Scholar 

  4. Sjövall P, Lemmetti A, Vanne J, Lahti S, Hämä-läinen TD (2022) High-level synthesis implementation of an embedded real-time HEVC intra encoder on FPGA for media applications. ACM Trans Des Autom Electron Syst 27(4):1–34 https://doi.org/10.1145/3491215(Article No.: 35)

  5. Akgün G, Khan H, Hebaish M, Elshimy M, Ghany MAAE, Göhringer D (2020) SysIDLib: a high-level synthesis FPGA library for online system identification. In: Applied reconfigurable computing. Architectures, tools, and applications. ARC 2020. Lecture notes in computer science, vol 12083. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44534-8_8

  6. Nane R, Sima V-M, Olivier B, Meeuws R, Yankova Y, Bertels K (2012) DWARV 2.0: a CoSy-based C-to-VHDL hardware compiler. In: 22nd international conference on field programmable logic and applications (FPL), pp 619–622. https://doi.org/10.1109/FPL.2012.6339221

  7. Ferrandi F et al (2021) Invited: Bambu: an open-source research framework for the high-level synthesis of complex applications. In: 2021 58th ACM/IEEE design automation conference (DAC), pp 1327–1330

  8. Özkan MA et al (2020) AnyHLS: high-level synthesis with partial evaluation. IEEE Trans Comput Aided Des Integr Circuits Syst 39(11):3202–3214

    Article  Google Scholar 

  9. Mousouliotis PG, Petrou LP (2020) CNN-grinder: from algorithmic to high-level synthesis descriptions of CNNs for low-end-low-cost FPGA SoCs. Microprocess Microsyst https://doi.org/10.1016/j.micpro.2020.102990

  10. Tani H, Yamawaki A (2023) Memory access optimization for former process of pencil drawing style image conversion in high-level synthesis. In: Parallel and distributed computing, applications and technologies (PDCAT 2022), lecture notes in computer science, vol 13798, pp 57–68

  11. Tani H, Yamawaki A (2023) Effect of line segment size on pencil drawing-like image conversion hardware developed by high-level synthesis. In: Proceedings of the 28th international symposium on artificial life and robotics 2023 (AROB 2023), pp 740–743

  12. Tani H, Yamawaki A (2023) Process integration to realize full pipelined pencil drawing style image conversion hardware in high-level synthesis. In: 2023 5th international conference on computer communication and the internet (ICCCI), Fujisawa, Japan, 2023, pp 251–255. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICCCI59363.2023.10210175

  13. Tani H, Yamawaki A (2023) Process chaining without image and performance loss for pencil drawing style image conversion in high-level synthesis. In: The 10th IIAE international conference on intelligent systems and image processing 2023. To appear

  14. Yamasaki M, Yamawaki A (2020) Duplicating same argument of function to realize efficient hardware for high-level synthesis. Artif Life Robot 25(2):248–252. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10015-019-00576-4

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Kyushu Institute of Technology, Fukuoka, Japan

    Honoka Tani & Akira Yamawaki

Authors
  1. Honoka Tani
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Akira Yamawaki
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Akira Yamawaki.

Additional information

Publisher's Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Honoka Tani is the presenter of this paper.

This work was submitted and accepted for the Journal Track of the joint symposium of the 29th International Symposium on Artificial Life and Robotics, the 9th International Symposium on BioComplexity, and the 7th International Symposium on Swarm Behavior and Bio-Inspired Robotics (Beppu, Oita and Online, January 24–26, 2024).

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Tani, H., Yamawaki, A. Light-weight color image conversion like pencil drawing for high-level synthesized hardware. Artif Life Robotics 29, 29–36 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10015-023-00927-2

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10015-023-00927-2

Keywords

Search

Navigation