Design of Multiple-Target Tracking System on Heterogeneous System-on-Chip Devices

Advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) generally embrace heterogeneous platforms consisting of central processing units and field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) to achieve higher performance and energy efficiency. The multiple-target tracking (MTT) system is an important component in most ADAS and is particularly suited for heterogeneous implementation to improve responsiveness. However, the platform heterogeneity necessitates numerous design decisions to obtain the optimal application partitioning between the processor and the FPGA. In this paper, multiple configurations of the MTT application have been investigated on the Xilinx Zynq commercial heterogeneous platform. An extensive design space exploration was performed to recommend the optimal configuration with high performance and energy efficiency. A reduction of more than 65%, both in execution time and energy consumption, has been obtained by the utilization of the heterogeneous architecture. Finally, an analytical model is proposed to estimate execution time and energy consumption to enable a rapid exploration of the different configurations and predict the performance that can be expected with future system-on-chip (SoC) platforms and radar sensors in ADAS.