Intelligent camera for object identification and tracking

Abstract

Intelligent cameras extend the concept of smart camera by directly processing the pixels as they stream from the sensor. Working in a synchronous streamed pipeline processing mode, an FPGA incorporated into the camera is able to operate at the camera pixel clock rate. With careful design, this scheme minimizes memory accesses and reduces the latency over DSP based smart cameras. The transformation of the software image processing algorithm to an efficient intelligent camera implementation is demonstrated for global vision within robot soccer. The resulting intelligent camera requires no memory outside of the FPGA, and is able to provide the position and orientation of the objects while the image is being streamed from the sensor. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.