High-Definition Video Surveillance

Once again, image processing represents a lucrative area for even the cost-effective end of FPGA architectures. Engineers from Altera Corp. posted an article this week in Cyber India On Line describing implementation of an H.264 encoder for processing an HD stream in surveillance applications.

There’s a couple interesting points to note here: The module is based on a Cyclone III architecture, proving that even mid-range FPGAs are beginning to take over the DSP heavy-lifting duties in signal and image processing. Since most streaming data is transferred using Internet Protocol and Ethernet these days, the communication channelare IP-based and the FPGA embeds an Ethernet MAC.

On another “IP” front, the intellectual property core for the encoder itself is provided by Eyelytics. Another partner for Altera in this particular design is Aptina, provider of the sensor (and until June 1, when it spun out, a division of Micron Technology). I experienced some problems in moving from one page to another in the Altera?CIOL article, so you can see a photograph of the surveillance camera prototype by clicking here. As this blog has mentioned numerous times in the past six months, this is the year in which FPGAs take on a primary role in stream processing for any signal-intensive task in general DSP and image-processing realms.