An analogue video interface for general-purpose DSP

Abstract

This paper presents a real-time, high speed interface for the capture of live analogue video for DSP based video processing applications. The interface makes use of the link ports, which are standard features of general-purpose digital signal processor (DSP). Hence the interface can be used for the different DSPs with minimum customisation. Current technologies for video processing are either based on application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) or programmable processors specialised for video or video DSP as well as a hybrid of the above with a host computer. Such technologies come equip with software tools and application programming interfaces (APIs) to support a variety of common video processing tasks. Some of these may have support for analogue video interfaces while others simply cater only to digital video inputs/outputs. Unfortunately, the majority of video sources in daily life are analogue in nature. Video application designers are thus faced with the problem of finding a suitable simple analogue video interface for their applications. Moreover, for those designers who design their own video processing algorithms using general-purpose DSP to circumvent the cost and limitations imposed by these suites of standard solutions, the need for a simple analogue video interface is further underscored. The proposed interface thus serves to provide a simple, flexible, high speed and low-cost analogue interface to resolve the analogue video conversion problem and allow designers to concentrate on their DSP based applications. The interface can support both real-time and non real-time applications.