An embedded architecture for implementation of a video acquisition module of a smart camera system

This paper presents an embedded architecture for real-time video acquisition module which is a vital part of a smart camera system. The Xilinx ML-507 platform has been used to develop the proposed embedded architecture. Apart from the required necessary peripherals, the platform contains a Virtex-5 FX FPGA device having PowerPC 440 processor embedded in the FPGA fabric itself. In order to develop the required hardware and software in an integrated fashion, Xilinx Embedded Development Kit (EDK) design tool has been used. A number of Xilinx provided IPs are customized to realize the hardware modules in the FPGA fabric. To implement the real-time video capture and display functionality for the smart camera system, a Pan-Tilt-Zoom (PTZ) camera and a VGA monitor have been interfaced with the platform. This interfacing uses on-board VGA input video codec and DVI transmitter chips. The control registers of these chips are configured using the embedded PowerPC 440 processor with Inter-Integrated Circuit (IIC) bus controller´s low-level device driver functions. The application software, written in C language, runs on top of a standalone software platform and uses the application programmer interface (API) provided by the software platform. The device utilization summary shows that, with the proposed embedded architecture based video acquisition module, the remaining FPGA resources are sufficient for implementing any reasonably complex real-time video processing application.