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by jason mcdonald, senior editor | read other
blog posts |
According to data from Cisco Systems, Inc., video and image traffic over the Internet is set to grow by 131% by 2013, and by many estimates will exceed all other traffic.
We all know how mobile phone use is becoming smart phone use - with pictures, instant messaging, web browsing and other data intense functions nearly overwhelming the network.
But beyond that lies an entire arena of intelligent image and video processing in not just consumer but industrial and military applications.
This month we take a look at news and new products for digital video and image processing.
contents of this post:
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Video Processing: The Consumer and Beyond to Industrial
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Video Processing: DSP and Embedded Video Processing
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Video Processing: FPGA-based Solutions
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feedback - give it
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Video Processing: The Consumer and Beyond to Industrial
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Video and image processing is more than just moving lots of data around the network.
But even that basic function, which relies on compression algorithms to do it better and faster is experiencing massive growth.
Check out the
Cisco Visual Networking Index: Forecast and Methodology, 2008-2013
. One big take-away from the report - "The sum of all forms of video (TV, video on demand, Internet, and P2P) will account for over 91 percent of global consumer traffic by 2013.
Internet video alone will account for over 60 percent of all consumer Internet traffic in 2013."
What happens in the larger network world, and consumer space, ultimately happens to the embedded and device space.
So device makers are scrambling to leverage the digital video explosion.
Beyond just sheer data, many companies are focusing on the 'intelligent processing' aspect of digital video in applications like machine vision.
Ittiam, for example, released their 60ms Ultra Low-Latency Streaming Systems for High Definition Video.
The platform utilizes Texas Instruments Incorporated (TI) DaVinci™ and OMAP™ 3 technologies, using standard operating systems on the ARM® such as Linux.
Ittiam's streaming systems have been deployed in latency-critical applications including live communication, video surveillance, UAV navigation, interactive multimedia applications, collaborative medical devices and custom government and defense applications. (More information,
here
).
Machine vision is another critical area in digital image processing.
Check out
BitFlow
and
Alacron
in particular.
As a larger company, National Instruments has had the resources to produe an in-depth microsite on its machine vision products and technologies,
here
. Even if you do not go with an NI solution, the microsite is a great learning resource on machine vision and target applications!
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Video Processing: DSP and Embedded Video Processing
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Image and video processing have been hard to separate from that workhorse of technology: digital signal processing.
DSP's were the first movers in processing large amounts of digital data.
A good early book, for example, is
Embedded Image Processing on the TMS320C6000 DSP: Examples in Code Composer Studio and MATLAB
. Texas Instruments
' main digital image processing platform, of course, is their
DaVinci™ Platform
.
Analog Devices has propelled its push into the space with its flagship BlackFin® processor.
Blackfin® 16/32-bit embedded processors offer software flexibility and scalability for convergent applications: multi-format audio, video, voice and image processing, multimode baseband and packet processing, control processing, and real-time security.
The company has done a great job at making it easy to get started with BlackFin, by offering
EZ-KIT Lite®
, for example.
Finally, don't miss their robust learning and video center on BlackFin for digital video,
here
.
So the two giants of DSP - Texas Instruments and Analog Devices - are both seeking to converge embedded processors and digital signal processing by two different routes.
Viva choices!
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Video Processing: FPGA-based Solutions
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FPGAs have become competitive with DSPs in many areas, and as the worlds of embedded systems and DSP continue to converge, many design engineers look to FPGAs for their digital video and image processing needs.
At the recent Embedded World 2010 in Germany, Xilinx, Inc. introduced the their Xilinx® Spartan®-6 FPGA Industrial Imaging Targeted Design Platform to accelerate development of high-performance video processing applications for low-cost, low-power industrial imaging systems.
According to the release, industrial equipment OEMs can now rapidly build and evaluate reprogrammable imaging solutions with high-definition image resolutions, specialized image sensor interfaces, and intelligent video and advanced image processing algorithms. (More information,
here
).
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Don't miss the new Xilinx Spartan®-6 FPGA Industrial Video Processing Kit,
here
.
Altera, too, has gotten into the digital video race.
Check out their excellent white paper,
Video and Image Processing Design Using FPGAs
. So in sum, FPGAs are another option as you seek to leverage your design experience to take advantage of this huge digital video and image processing wave coming from consumer into embedded systems!
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Express Logic develops, markets and supports the ThreadX® real-time operating system (RTOS), NetX™TCP/IP networking stack, USBX™ USB stack, FileX® embedded file system, and PEGX™ GUI toolkit for embedded applications.
ThreadX is a royalty-free, full source code, small-footprint, low-overhead RTOS that is extremely easy to learn and use. ThreadX is one of the most widely deployed RTOS products in the world, with over 1.25 billion products based on ThreadX.
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