Moving target indicators on your TV

Most of the Consumer Electronics Show previews have focused on either the smaller than usual crowds, or the fascination with television beyond HD. If the barkers on the show floor are to be believed, we’re not satisfied with 1080p gonzo flat screens. We want 3D, we want an infinite succession of picture in pictures, we want interactive plot creation at every point in a broadcast drama. But Xilinx partner Impulse Accelerated Technologies is showing a software trick at CES that is indeed unique – the ability to track a particular person, character, or object in streaming video.

While this may be unique in the consumer environment, mil-aero developers may recognize that it bears some resemblance to Moving Target Indicator technology. Impulse is demonstrating the tracking of Nemo in a “Finding Nemo” demonstration, using a Xilinx Spartan 3A to perform real-time image processing – in this case, inverse discrete cosine transform, YUV-to-RGB color conversion, and run-time-configurable video image filtering. Impulse’s point is to show that even a lower power and less costly FPGA like Spartan can handle real-time object identification and tracking.

Impulse does not develop the system itself, but offers C-to-FPGA development systems for streaming video. The CoDeveloper tools and libraries Impulse is showing at CES are used in conjunction with Xilinx’s Platform Studio and System Generator tools.

UPDATE:  Impulse has just posted a video to demonstrate the Nemo finder.