Using Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) as accelerators for image or 
video processing operations and algorithms has gained increasing attention 
over the last few years. One reason for that is FPGAs are able to exploit both 
temporal and spatial parallelism. In this paper two platforms for FPGA-based 
real-time image and video processing are presented and compared against each 
other. With both of these platforms it is possible to update the physical 
resources during run-time by exploiting the dynamic partial reconfi guration 
capabilities of Xilinx Virtex FPGAs. The analysis of both platforms with 
respect to their benets and drawbacks has led to the concept of an optimal 
FPGA-based dynamically and partially reconfigurable platform for real-time 
video and image processing.