Summary: | Feature matching is an essential step for autonomous robot to localize itself during navigation. However, it is often difficult to achieve the matching in real-time due to limited on-board computing resources. We present an FPGA implementation for stream-processing based feature matching called Binary Search Tree Matcher (BSTM) that utilizes a balanced binary search tree. To improve the matching precision, we integrated a ratio-test (RT) outlier rejection mechanism in our design. Our proposed FPGA-based BSTM is scalable and resource efficient, and significantly faster than the best-performing hardware implementation in the literature. When compared to the commonly used Linear Exhaustive Search (LES) method running on the FPGA, our proposed design is approximately 12X faster.
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