Design of an embedded image acquisition system

Embedded eye tracking systems usually require high performance of the physical devices on which they are implemented. Low-power consumption, low-heat and small size factors create barriers in decision-making to define the core components of the final design of such a system. For the proposed system, a custom board was manufactured to meet these requirements. The board uses an ARM Cortex A9-based microcontroller, FPGA and two external RAM memory integrated circuits. However, in order to ensure maximal efficiency - in terms of utilization - of each hardware component, proper software modules should be designed. In this paper we are presenting an image acquisition architecture for eye tracking systems and discuss its performance.