DreamCam: A modular FPGA-based smart camera architecture

Merwan Birem , François Berry (1)

1 IP - Institut Pascal

DreamCam is a modular smart camera constructed with the use of an FPGA like main processing board. The core of the camera is an Altera Cyclone-III associated with a CMOS imager and six private Ram blocks. The main novel feature of our work consists in proposing a new smart camera architecture and several modules (IP) to efficiently extract and sort the visual features in real time. In this paper, extraction is performed by a Harris and Stephen filtering associated with customized modules. These modules extract, select and sort visual features in real-time. As a result, DreamCam (with such a configuration) provides a description of each visual feature in the form of its position and the grey-level template around it.

Mots clés: Smart camera; Image processing; Interest points; VHDL; Harris and Stephen algorithm; Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA); Hardware implementation; Real-time system

Domaines: Traitement du signal et de l'image [eess.SP]

Merwan Birem, François Berry. DreamCam: A modular FPGA-based smart camera architecture. Journal of Systems Architecture, 2014, 60 (6), pp.519 - 527. ⟨10.1016/j.sysarc.2014.01.006⟩. ⟨hal-01625648⟩