This paper describes the design of a programmable stand-alone system for real time vision pre-processing tasks. The system's architecture has been implemented and tested using an ACE16k chip and a Xilinx xc4028xl FPGA. The ACE16k chip consists basically of an array of 128x128 identical mixed-signal processing units, locally interacting, which operate in accordance with single instruction multiple data (SIMD) computing architectures and has been designed for high speed image pre-processing tasks requiring moderate accuracy levels (7 bits). The input images are acquired using the optical input capabilities of the ACE16k chip, and after being processed according to a programmed algorithm, the images are represented at real time on a TFT screen. The system is designed to store and run different algorithms and to allow changes and improvements. Its main board includes a digital core, implemented on a Xilinx 4028 Series FPGA, which comprises a custom programmable Control Unit, a digital monochrome PAL video generator and an image memory selector. Video SRAM chips are included to store and access images processed by the ACE16k. Two daughter boards hold the program SRAM and a video DAC-mixer card is used to generate composite analog video signal.

Date Published: 30 June 2005
PDF: 8 pages
Proc. SPIE 5837, VLSI Circuits and Systems II, (30 June 2005); doi: 10.1117/12.608220

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 5837:
VLSI Circuits and Systems II
Jose Fco. Lopez; Francisco V. Fernandez; Jose Maria Lopez-Villegas; Jose M. de la Rosa, Editor(s)