This work proposes an implementation in Field Programmable Gate
Array (FPGA) of the Otsu’s method applied to real-time tracking
of worms called Caenorhabditis elegans. Real-time tracking is necessary
to measure changes in the worm’s behavior in response to
treatment with Ribonucleic Acid (RNA) interference. Otsu’s method
is a global thresholding algorithm used to define an optimal threshold
between two classes. However, this technique in real-time applications
associated with the processing of high-resolution videos
has a high computational cost because of the massive amount of
data generated. Otsu’s algorithm needs to identify the worms in
each frame captured by a high-resolution camera in a real-time
analysis of the worm’s behavior. Thus, this work proposes a highperformance
implementation of Otsu’s algorithm in FPGA. The
results show it was possible to achieve a speedup up to 5 times
higher than similar works in the literature.