Low-Power FPGA Architecture Based Monitoring Applications in Precision Agriculture

Abstract

Today’s on-chip systems technology has grounded impressive advances in computing power and energy consumption. The choice of the right architecture depends on the application. In our case, we were studying vegetation monitoring algorithms in precision agriculture. This study presents a system based on a monitoring algorithm for agricultural fields, an electronic architecture based on a CPU-FPGA SoC system and the OpenCL parallel programming paradigm. We focused our study on our own dataset of agricultural fields to validate the results. The fields studied in our case are in the Guelmin-Oued noun region in the south of Morocco. These fields are divided into two areas, with a total surface of 3.44 Ha2 for the first field and 3.73 Ha2 for the second. The images were collected using a DJI-type unmanned aerial vehicle and an RGB camera. Performance evaluation showed that the system could process up to 86 fps versus 12 fps or 20 fps in C/C++ and OpenMP implementations, respectively. Software optimizations have increased the performance to 107 fps, which meets real-time constraints.