Bit-Stream Processing with No Bit-Stream: Efficient Software Simulation of Stochastic Vision Machines

Stochastic computing (SC) is an emerging paradigm that has come to the fore in computer vision applications in the last decade. Complex arithmetic circuitry is reduced to simple logic gates, fed with uniform random bit-streams. Due to the requirement of long bit-streams, the computer-aided simulation of SC systems is facing run-time and memory-use challenges. This work presents an efficient approach for emulating SC-based systems. The proposed simulation technique does not utilize actual bit-streams but produces similar results as if the traditional stochastic bit-streams were processed. The data are processed with the aid of a correlation-controlled contingency table (CT) construct. Our technique emulates three state-of-the-art stochastic bit-streams, namely, bit-streams with binomial distribution, pseudo-random, and low-discrepancy bit-streams. We validate the proposed technique by emulating three new SC image processing designs. We propose novel SC designs for (i) template matching, (ii) image compositing, and (iii) bilinear interpolation. Our experimental results show that our simulation technique provides comparable accuracy to processing actual bit-streams, but at a significantly lower run-time and memory usage.