An FPGA Application

I think one of the more promising applications of FPGA is in real-time visualization. To be able to have a solid foundation on this, I need to study graphics first or say, Digital Image Processing. I am currently reading a documentation of the Master's thesis (March 2005) entitled An FPGA-based 3D Graphics System by Niklas Knutsson of Linköping Institute of Technology. His abstract goes like this.

This report documents the work done by the author to design and implement a 3D graphic system on an FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array). After a preamble with a background presentation to the project, a very brief introduction in computer graphics techniques and computer graphics theory is given. Then, the hardware available to the project, along with an analysis of general requirements is examined. The following chapter contains the proposed graphics system design for FPGA implementation. A broad approach to separate the design and the eventual implementation was used. Two 3D pipelines are suggested - one fully capable high-end version and one which use minimal resources. The documentation of the effort to implement the minimal graphics system previously discussed then follows. The documentation outlines the work done without going too deep into detail, and is followed by the largest of the tests conducted. Finally, chapter seven concludes the project with the most important project conclusions and some suggestions for future work. 

I am after knowing the framework of such an application since there are already lots of books that discuss the physics of real-time graphics. I find quite few papers, much less books, that discusses the implementation of image processing on FPGA.