FPGA - Image Processing

Hello,

I am looking for a good FPGA development tool to implement some image processing algorithms.
The idea is also to communicate with a MAC PC to read and write the pictures. The image processing is done on the FPGA board.

We have two large players Xilinx and Altera. The idea is to go for a Altera board: Altera DE2-70 Board (Terasic) + 5 Mega Pixel Digital Camera and LCD panel.
Anyone experience with this board or other boards.

I am working mainly on MAC OS and I have following tools: octave, scilab and Mathematica.
I have no MATLAB or labview.
I like to work with free, cheap or open source tools on MAC OS.
I have no image processing experience in octave or scilab, so I will implement first the algorithms in Mathematica than I will translate it to a code for the FPGA.
I still need to find out how I can do this.
Any experience users that use mathematica, octave or scilab, tips are welcome.

Al tips and trics are welcome.

Thanks.

Regards,
JrV

you will need quartus for altera or ise for xilinx. afaik, they are only available for windows or linux. you can get free editions of the software (you should get a 1 year licence with the dev board) but the free version has limitations. there are no free alternatives.

TrickyDicky said:

you will need quartus for altera or ise for xilinx. afaik, they are only available for windows or linux. you can get free editions of the software (you should get a 1 year licence with the dev board) but the free version has limitations. there are no free alternatives.

Click to expand...

The Web Edition which is a free version of Xilinx ISE support the low-cost Spartan family. So there are no restrictions. Correct?
How good are these low cost Spartan family for image processing.

What about Quartus, can I use the full functionality of the Altera DE2-70 Board with the free version tool?

Anyone experience in installing the Linux version on MAC OS X 10.6, theoretical it should be possible, I think.

Thanks
JrV