Remote underwater dual cameras video image acquisition system using Linux based embedded PC104

To obtain a wider view around underwater robotic vehicle, a remote underwater dual cameras acquisition system based on V4L2 is developed. Athena III PC104 with embedded Linux uses two USB cameras for the hardware development platform. After transplanting the embedded Linux OS and drivers, the image acquisition combined with V4L2 using the X264 and FFMPEG is implemented for digital image encoding and decoding. The images are transported into two separate image channels to network via User Datagram Protocol (UDP) socket. A graphical user interface is designed using GTK toolkit for user display purpose. Experimental tests had shown that the two channel image data were able to transmit independently without much interference and data loss. In addition, the image size of 320×240 transmitting at a frame rate of 10 frames per second had shown a good quality video. The proposed acquisition system has a good scalability and offers a new approach for embedded system design for remote multi-channel signal acquisition in underwater.