An Open Bus Architecture for Real-Time Video Applications

Abstract

In this paper a coarse-grain bus architecture, which provides flexible and reconfigurable solutions for vision machine development is presented. This bus architecture is host-independent and allows the use of heterogeneous application boards. These hardware modules are linked to a fast bus, called a DRIFT bus, via a standard interface which we define here. The DRIFT bus is a dynamically reconfigurable bus, meaning that data paths can be changed during the process to fit the communication requirements. It allows high-speed data block transfers at 1 Gbit/s. Moreover, it supports different transfer modes, such as parallel and pipeline transfers. To validate our bus concept a prototype has been developed. We give the most important performances obtained with this machine and some examples of real-time video algorithms (Difference Of Frames, Multi-pass filtering) are presented. Being based on a fast and flexible bus, our bus architecture can be used in wide-range vision applications.