Detection and Tracking of Moving Objects in Public Environments on the ZYNQ Platform
Real-time processing · Mohajer Technical University of Isfahan · 2014 – 2017
- TITLE
- Detection and tracking of moving objects in public environments on the ZYNQ platform (real-time processing)
- DEGREE
- B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering — Electronic Technology
- UNIVERSITY
- Mohajer Technical University of Isfahan (MTU), Isfahan, Iran
- DEFENDED
- 30 August 2016
- GRADE
- 19.75 / 20
- SUPERVISOR
- Dr. Mohammadreza Zaker-Haghighi
- COLLABORATOR
- Sina Shiry
Overview
This thesis built a complete real-time system for detecting and tracking moving objects in public environments on a Xilinx Zynq-7000 SoC — running on a ZYBO development board, whose SoC pairs an ARM processor with FPGA fabric, making it a natural target for HW/SW co-design. The design targeted high speed, high accuracy and strong security at once, while staying cost-effective and able to run standalone — no host PC in the loop.
The pipeline takes live video in over HDMI, isolates a target by color-range filtering, tracks it, and estimates the distance to the object from its apparent size. Results are shown simultaneously on an LED-matrix panel and a VGA monitor, while the distance telemetry streams out over UART.
The development flow moved from algorithm to silicon in three stages: the algorithms were first verified in MATLAB, then optimized in OpenCV, and finally synthesized to hardware with High-Level Synthesis in the Vivado toolchain (Vivado SDK) — with C, C++, HLS and Python across the stack.
- HDMI IN
- COLOR FILTER
- OBJECT TRACKING
- DISTANCE CALC
- VGA · LED PANEL · UART
Contributions
- End-to-end real-time video pipeline on a ZYBO (ARM + FPGA) SoC: HDMI input through detection, tracking and distance calculation to simultaneous VGA and LED-matrix output plus UART telemetry.
- HW/SW co-design flow: MATLAB for algorithm verification, OpenCV for optimization, then High-Level Synthesis and Vivado (SDK) synthesis to move the hot loops into FPGA fabric.
- Color-range detection with object tracking and object-size-based distance estimation, designed for public-environment scenes.
- Cost-effective, standalone build: the whole system runs on a single ZYBO board with no host PC, meeting the speed, accuracy and security goals together.
- Open results: the full thesis (in Persian) and the source code are publicly available — see the links below.
Methods & technologies
Outcomes & links
Defended on 30 August 2016 with a grade of 19.75/20, supervised by Dr. Mohammadreza Zaker-Haghighi with collaborator Sina Shiry. Live demonstrations of the running system were shown at the defense — several are recorded below. Both the thesis document and the implementation are public:
Live demonstrations
Recorded demonstrations of the running system, captured on the Digilent ZYBO (Zynq-7000) board. Videos are muted and play only on demand.