Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge all those who have helped me to get me where I currently am in my understanding of FPGA-based design. In particular, I would like to thank my research students (David Johnson, Kim Gribbon, Chris Johnston, Aaron Bishell, Andreas Buhler and Ni Ma) who helped to shape my thinking and approach to FPGA development as we struggled together to work out efficient ways of implementing image processing algorithms. This book is as much a reflection of their work as it is of mine.

Most of our algorithms were programmed for FPGAs using Handel-C and were tested on boards provided by Celoxica Ltd. I would like to acknowledge the support provided by Roger Gook and his team, originally with the Celoxica University Programme, and later with Agility Design Solutions. Roger provided heavily discounted licences for the DK development suite, without which many of the ideas presented in this book would not have been as fully explored.

Massey University has provided a supportive environment and the freedom for me to explore this field. In particular, Serge Demidenko gave me the encouragement and the push to begin playing with FPGAs. Since that time, he has been a source of both inspiration and challenging questions. Other colleagues who have been of particular encouragement are Gourab Sen Gupta and Richard Harris. I would also like to acknowledge Paul Lyons, who co-supervised a number of my students.

Early versions of some of the material in this book were presented as half-day tutorials at the IEEE Region 10 Conference (TenCon) in 2005 in Melbourne, Australia, the IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP) in 2007 in San Antonio, Texas, USA, and the 2010 Asian Conference on Computer Vision (ACCV) in Queenstown, New Zealand. I would like to thank attendees at these workshops for providing valuable feedback and stimulating discussion.

During 2008, I spent a sabbatical with the Circuits and Systems Group at Imperial College London, UK. I am grateful to Peter Cheung, who hosted my visit, and provided a quiet office, free from distractions and interruptions. It was here that I actually began writing, and got most of the text outlined at least. I would particularly like to thank Peter Cheung, Christos Bouganis, Peter Sedcole and George Constantinides for discussions and opportunities to bounce ideas off.

My wife, Robyn, has given me the freedom of many evenings and weekends over the two years since then to complete this manuscript. I am grateful for both her patience and her support. She now knows that field programmable gate arrays are not alligators with ray guns stalking the swamp. This book is dedicated to her.

Donald Bailey