Smart cameras are important components in any Human Computer Interaction. In any remote surveillance scenario, smart cameras have to take intelligent decisions to select frames of interest to minimize communication and processing overhead. A clustering based change detection algorithm has been implemented in our smart camera system for filtering frames with significant changes. In this paper we propose a platform based framework for implementing clustering based change detection algorithm using HW-SW co-design based methodology. The complete system is implemented on Xilinx XUP Virtex-II Pro FPGA board. The overall algorithm is running on PowerPC405 and some of the blocks which are computationally intensive and more frequently called are implemented as custom IP using VHDL. Total gate count of the design is 2699K. © 2010 IEEE.