An Artificial Cellular Convolution Architecture for Real-Time Image Processing

An artificial cell is comprised of the most basic elements in a hierarchical system, that has minimal functionality, but general enough to obey the rules of “artificial life.” The ability to replicate, organize hierarchy, and generalize within an environment is some of the properties of an artificial cell. We present a hardware artificial cell having the properties of generalization ability, the ability of self-organization, and the reproducibility. The cells are used in parallel hardware architecture for implementing the real-time 2D image convolution operation. The proposed hardware design is implemented on FPGA and tested on images. We report improved processing speeds and demonstrate its usefulness in an image filtering application.