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Altera_Forum's avatar
Altera_Forum
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14 years ago

Camera Design

I am working on a project that involves inputing data from 3-6 machine vision cameras (6 monochrome or 3 color) performing some basic image processing on the streams from the cameras and then saving data out to storage. The cameras need to operate with video frame rates. I was just wondering if I could get some suggestions on if this is even possible with FPGA, or what kind of hardware could be used to accomplish this.

Thanks for any help!

14 Replies

  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
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    14 years ago

    yes, FPGAs like video. Altera has a collection of IP cores called the Video and Image Processing Suite which contains some broadcast oriented cores (scaling, de-interlacing) and there are also some 3rd party cores designed for wide dynamic range image sensors

    depending on your requirements, you might be OK with the low cost Cyclone IV E or GX family. you will also want to think about external memory interfaces (DDR2)
  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
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    14 years ago

    Thanks for your reply. The operations I would be performing are actually fairly simple. I just need to to a matrix multiplication of the data and a scaling.

    And so it is possible to have multiple video streams going to one FPGA for processing?
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    Altera_Forum
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    14 years ago

    What is the digital format of the camera outputs, e.g. USB, GigE, CameraLink...

  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
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    14 years ago

    I haven't actually picked out the cameras yet, but the ones I am looking at are either GigE, Firewire 800, or CameraLink.

  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
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    14 years ago

    gj is right, you definitely want to look at a camera with an FPGA friendly interface. i don't think Firewire is a good idea, GigE or CameraLink might be

  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
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    14 years ago

    CameraLink will be by far the easiest interface. One (or two, depending on data rate) interface chips (DS90CR288A) per camera and you've got parallel data streaming into the FPGA.

  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
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    14 years ago

    So assuming I get an interface chip for each camera, will an FPGA be able to handle six parallel streams of video data?

  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
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    14 years ago

    Yes, it's likely. You'll need enough I/O pins to handle all the cameras (8, 10, 12 or 16 data lines plus clock, line_valid & frame_valid for each camera). It sounds like your processing is pretty simple so you won't need a lot of resources. You can try it all out in Quartus first without building anything.

  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
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    14 years ago

    --- Quote Start ---

    So assuming I get an interface chip for each camera, will an FPGA be able to handle six parallel streams of video data?

    --- Quote End ---

    Shouldnt be a problem, but it will really depend on what operations you are going to do. If you need to buffer the video you will need a lot of external memory bandwidth. We have a project that has 16 video inputs, all of them buffered, on a single (large) FPGA.
  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
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    14 years ago

    True. If buffering is required then it gets a lot more complicated. If you just want to pass the data through and do the processing in real time then it's pretty straightforward. Where does the data go after the processing is done?