At Critical Link, we work very closely with Texas Instruments, and I had a recent opportunity to co-author a white paper with TI’s Asheesh Bhardwaj, a senior applications engineer. The topic is machine vision, a technology that is becoming increasingly important, and one we’re hearing about a lot more often from our customers and prospects that we were just a few years back.
More specifically, the white paper lays out an architecture for compute- intensive machine vision. This is an architecture that can be used when you have processing needs that can’t be handled by the completely off- the-shelf building blocks that are available, and when your application is not produced in volumes sufficient to justify the expense and hassle of creating a dedicated ASIC from scratch.
The architecture that’s outlined the white paper is based on our MityDSP-L138F SoM, which has been deployed in instrumentation and inspection equipment applications. This SoM features the TI OMAP-L138 DSP+ARM9™ processor, and a Spartan-6 FPGA. (We also offer a development kit that includes a module, camera (from a choice of five), baseboard, and SDK containing sample algorithms.)
Anyway, the white paper can be found here.
Those interested in a more detailed discussion on this topic may want to look at a recent IEEE paper published by TI, “An Optimized Vision Library Approach for Embedded Systems”, G. Dedeoglu, B. Kisacanin, D. Moore, V. Sharma, and A. Miller, Proceedings of the IEEE Workshop on Embedded Computer Vision, pp. 8-13, 2011, which is available for download to IEEE Xplore members.
Enjoy!