Abstract: Digital image processing is widely used for image processing like feature extraction, segmentation, pattern recognition, etc. Edge detection, within image processing is a basic tool used to obtain information from the frame for feature extraction and object segmentation. The purpose of edge detection is to reduce the amount of data in an image significantly and to preserve the structural properties for further processing of image. It plays a vital role in image processing for finding out the boundaries in an image. Sobel operator is a gradient based operator which is used in edge detection of an image which creates accenting edges of an image. The image pixels are read by MATLAB and processed in Xilinx to find the gradient. This project presents implementation of sobel edge detection using MATLAB-XILINX co-simulation, thus solving the problem of image processing using HDL.

Keywords: Sobel operator, kernel, image gradients, edge detection, MATLAB, XILINX.