Parallel Processing of Sobel Edge Detection on FPGA: Enhancing Real-Time Image Analysis

Detection of object boundaries and significant features within an image is one of the most important processes in image processing and computer vision, as it allows the identification of object boundaries and significant features within an image. In applications such as autonomous vehicles, surveillance systems, and medical imaging, real-time processing has become increasingly important, which requires hardware accelerators. In this paper, the improved Sobel edge detection algorithm was implemented using Verilog as an FPGA-based algorithm designed to perform real-time image processing under the Sobel edge detection algorithm for specially RGB images. The proposed design proposes an application of horizontal and vertical Sobel kernels in parallel in order to compute the gradient magnitudes for 1028 × 720 RGB images by taking the gradient magnitudes of 3 × 3 pixel windows. This work focuses on algorithmic complex reduction by using eight directional approaches, and parallel processing leads to reducing the architectural utilization.