Abstract
In this paper, a high-performance, low-area gradient-magnitude calculator architecture is proposed, based on approximate image processing. To reduce the computational complexity of the gradient-magnitude calculation, vector properties, the symmetry axis, and common terms were applied in a hardware-resource-shared architec-ture. The proposed gradient-magnitude calculator was implemented using an Altera Cyclone IV FPGA (EP4CE115F29) and the Quartus II v.16 device software. It satisfied the output-data quality while reducing the logic elements by 23% and the embedded multipliers by 76%, compared with previous work.