Image acquisition and processing for falling objects with line CCD sensor

In many industrial and agricultural fields, we should acquire and process the image of high-speed falling objects and then to output the characteristics of those. This paper presents an image acquisition and processing system for falling objects. It is based on the Texas Instrumentspsila TMS320C6416T (DSP6416), a high performance digital signal processor and Alterapsilas Field programmable gate array (FPGA) EP3C25F324. The image is captured by line CCD sensor and then the digital image data converted by analogue front-end (AFE) are transferred into FPGA, after pre-processing they are transferred into DSP6416 through the interface of first in first out (FIFO) in FPGA and external memory interfaces (EMIF) of DSP6416. Then the image data are processed in DSP6416. The controller area network (CAN) communication interface is provided for the command transfer between main PC and the system. Also this paper proposes a novel real-time method to get the areas, the average gray values and the centerspsila positions of the falling objects with line CCD sensor. Experimental results show that this system and the novel method are useful and powerful.