Synthesizing Power and Area Efficient Image Processing Pipelines on FPGAs using Customized Bit-widths

Abstract: High-level synthesis (HLS) has received significant attention in recent years, improving programmability for FPGAs. PolyMage is a domain-specific language (DSL) for image processing pipelines that also has a HLS backend to translate the input DSL into an equivalent circuit that can be synthesized on FPGAs, while leveraging an HLS suite. The data at each stage of a pipeline is stored using a fixed-point data type (alpha,beta) where alpha and beta denote the number of integral and fractional bits. The power and area savings while performing arithmetic operations on fixed-point data type is known to be significant over using floating point. In this paper, we first propose an interval-arithmetic based range analysis (alpha-analysis) algorithm to estimate the number of bits required to store the integral part of the data at each stage of an image processing pipeline. The analysis algorithm uses the homogeneity of pixel signals at each stage to cluster them and perform a combined range analysis. Secondly, we propose a software architecture for easily deploying any kind of interval/affine arithmetic based range analyses in the DSL compiler. Thirdly, we propose a new range analysis technique using Satisfiability Modulo Theory (SMT) solvers, and show that the range estimates obtained through it are very close to the lower bounds obtained through profile-driven analysis.We evaluated our bitwidth analysis algorithms on four image processing benchmarks listed in the order of increasing complexity: Unsharp Mask, Down-Up Sampling, Harris Corner Detection and Horn-Schunck Optical Flow. For example, on Optical Flow, the interval analysis based approach showed an 1.4x and 1.14x improvement on area and power metrics over floating-point representation respectively; whereas the SMT solver based approach showed 2.49x and 1.58x improvement on area and power metrics when compared to interval analysis.