Proposta de Implementação em Hardware do Algoritmo de Otsu Aplicado ao Rastreamento em Tempo Real de Vermes

This work proposes an implementation in Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) of the Otsu’s method applied to real-time tracking of worms called Caenorhabditis elegans. Real-time tracking is necessary to measure changes in the worm’s behavior in response to treatment with Ribonucleic Acid (RNA) interference. Otsu’s method is a global thresholding algorithm used to define an optimal threshold between two classes. However, this technique in real-time applications associated with the processing of high-resolution videos has a high computational cost because of the massive amount of data generated. Otsu’s algorithm needs to identify the worms in each frame captured by a high-resolution camera in a real-time analysis of the worm’s behavior. Thus, this work proposes a highperformance implementation of Otsu’s algorithm in FPGA. The results show it was possible to achieve a speedup up to 5 times higher than similar works in the literature.