High-Throughput, Resource-Efficient Multi-Dimensional Parallel Architecture for Space-Borne Sea-Land Segmentation

Sea-land segmentation based on edge detection is commonly utilized in ship detection, coastline extraction, and satellite system applications due to its high accuracy and rapid speed. Pixel-level distribution statistics do not currently satisfy the requirements for high-resolution, large-scale remote sensing image processing. To address the above problem, in this paper, we propose a high-throughput hardware architecture for sea-land segmentation based on multi-dimensional parallel characteristics. The proposed architecture is well suited to wide remote sensing images. Efficient multi-dimensional block level statistics allow for relatively infrequent pixel-level memory access; a boundary block tracking process replaces the whole-image scanning process, markedly enhancing efficiency. The tracking efficiency is further improved by a convenient two-step scanning strategy that feeds back the path state in a timely manner for a large number of blocks in the same direction appearing in the algorithm. The proposed architecture was deployed on Xilinx Virtex k7-410t to find that its practical processing time for a 32,768 × 1,024 remote sensing image is only about 0.4 s. The peak performance is 1.625 gbps, which is higher than other FPGA implementations of segmentation algorithms. The proposed structure is highly competitive in processing wide remote sensing images.