Open and Reconfigurable System on Chip Architecture with Hardware and Software Preprocessing Capabilities Used for Remote Image Acquisition

Most of the state of the art image acquisition systems include some kind of image preprocessing, but most of them are just focused on hardware or software preprocessing. This paper describes a working System-on-Chip architecture based on a state-of-the-art FPGA with both hardware and software pre-processing capabilities. The architecture is based on a Virtex 4 FX FPGA and uses a hard-core PowerPC 405 processor for software processing and a Gigabit Ethernet connection for interfacing the Image Processing System. The whole system is governed by a port of the official branch of Linux Kernel, simplifying the customization of the architecture for specific scenarios.