Images captured with a typical wide-angle camera lenses show spatial distortion, which necessitates spatial warping for subsequent analysis. In this research, an efficient architecture for an embedded system for the real-time correction of barrel distortion in wide-angle camera images is proposed. The spatial warping procedure follows a methodology based on least-squares estimation to correct the non-linear distortion in the images. A mathematical model of polynomial mapping is used to map the images from distorted image space onto the warped image space. The model parameters include the expansion polynomial coefficients, distortion centre and corrected centre. The spatial warping model is applied to several gastrointestinal images. A very high speed pipelined architecture for the real-time correction of barrel distortion in wide-angle camera images is being developed in the VLSI Systems Laboratory. The CORDIC based hardware design is suitable for an 8-bit input image of size up to 2056x2056 pixels and is pipelined to operate at a clock frequency of 33 MHz and it produces the corrected image at a rate of 30 frames per second. The VLSI system will facilitate the use of a dedicated hardware that could be mounted along with the camera unit.

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