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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!

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  • 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

    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

    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?
  • 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)