An Energy-Efficient Hardware Implementation of HOG-Based Object Detection at 1080HD 60 fps with Multi-Scale Support

A real-time and energy-efficient multi-scale object detector hardware implementation is presented in this paper. Detection is done using Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HOG) features and Support Vector Machine (SVM) classification. Multi-scale detection is essential for robust and practical applications to detect objects of different sizes. Parallel detectors with balanced workload are used to increase the throughput, enabling voltage scaling and energy consumption reduction. Image pre-processing is also introduced to further reduce power and area costs of the image scales generation. This design can operate on high definition 1080HD video at 60 fps in real-time with a clock rate of 270 MHz, and consumes 45.3 mW (0.36 nJ/pixel) based on post-layout simulations. The ASIC has an area of 490 kgates and 0.538 Mbit on-chip memory in a 45 nm SOI CMOS process.