Hardware-Accelerated 3D LiDAR-Based Object Detection with BEV Spatial Mapping on Embedded FPGA Platforms

Abstract

This paper introduces a hardware/software co-designed 3D object detection pipeline based on the PointPillars architecture for low-power embedded MPSoC deployment. The proposed system accelerates the computationally intensive stages in programmable logic (PL), including ROI filtering, coordinate transformation, pillarization, centroid extraction, and INT8 neural inference, using Vitis high-level synthesis (HLS) and an integrated Deep Learning Processing Unit (DPU). Control-oriented and irregular operations, such as data acquisition, Direct Memory Access (DMA) control, lightweight Non-Maximum Suppression (NMS), visualization, and logging, remain on the processing system (PS). The design targets the AMD Kria KV260 platform and achieves an accelerated core pipeline latency of 11.4 ms per frame at 300 MHz, corresponding to 87.4 Hz throughput, with 6.842 W board-level power consumption. Including PS-side NMS, the practical end-toend latency is approximately 12.2 ms for typical KITTI scenes. Compared with existing Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA)-based implementations implementations, the proposed design reduces latency by up to 33×. It achieves a 202× improvement in on-chip BRAM efficiency across HLS optimization versions through FIFO streaming, dataflow execution, and array partitioning. Experimental validation on physical hardware confirms that the proposed PL-accelerated hardware/software co-design provides a practical and cost-effective solution for real-time 3D LiDAR perception on embedded FPGA platforms.