Digital image processing (DIP) is an ever growing area with a
variety of applications including medicine, video surveillance, and
many more.. To implement the upcoming sophisticated DIP
algorithms and to process the large amount of data captured from
sources such as satellites or medical instruments, intelligent high
speed real-time systems have become imperative. Image
processing algorithms implemented in hardware (instead of
software) have recently emerged as the most viable solution for
improving the performance of image processing systems. This
paper reviews the relative merit of FPGA over softwares and
DSPs as a platform for implementation of DIP applications. Our
goal is to familiarize applications programmers with the state of
the art in compiling high-level programs to FPGAs, and to survey
the relevant research work on FPGAs. The outstanding features
which FPGAs offer such as optimization, high computational
density, low cost etc, make them an increasingly preferred choice
of experts in image processing field today