Chapter 6 - Basics of Embedded Video and Image Processing

Abstract

This chapter discusses the basics of embedded video and image processing. It also illustrates some common challenges that are encountered in embedded multimedia design and provides tips and tricks for dealing with them. Analog video standards differ in the ways they encode brightness and color information. Two standards dominate the broadcast television realm: National Television System Committee (NTSC) and Phase Alternation Line (PAL). High-definition (HD) systems often employ progressive scanning and can have much higher horizontal and vertical resolutions than standard definition (SD) systems. At its root, digitizing video involves both sampling and quantizing the analog video signal. Two-dimensional direct memory access (DMA) can facilitate transfers of macroblocks to and from external memory, allowing data manipulation as part of the actual transfer. Video processing algorithms fall into two main categories: spatial and temporal. It is important to understand the different types of video processing to discern the way the data is treated efficiently in each case. A particularly common video operator is the two-dimensional (2D) convolution kernel, which is used for many different forms of image filtering.