A Resource Efficient, HighSpeed FPGA Implementation of Lossless Image Compression for 3D Vision

Abstract: High speed laser-scanning cameras such as Ranger3 from SICK send 3D images with high resolution and dynamic range. Typically the bandwidth of the transmission link set the limit for the operational frequency of the system. This thesis show how a lossless image compression system in most cases can be used to reduce bandwidth requirements and allow for higher operational frequencies. A hardware encoder is implemented in pl on the ZC-706 development board featuring a ZYNQ Z7045 SoC. In addition, a software decoder is implemented in C++. The encoder is based on the felics and jpeg-ls lossless compression algorithms and the implementation operate at 214.3 MHz with a max throughput of 3.43 Gbit/s. The compression ratio is compared to that of competing implementations from Teledyne DALSA Inc. and Pleora Technologies on a set of typical 3D range data images. The proposed algorithm achieve a higher compression ratio while maintaining a small hardware footprint.