Embedded vision platform for video surveillance systems

Abstract

Automatic video surveillance systems are used in many different fields of applications like intelligent vehicles, intelligent highways or in security tasks. An automatic and correct interpretation of video sequences is based on the detection, tracking and classification of various objects under highly diverse conditions. This requires highly sophisticated algorithms as well as high computational performance to fulfil real-time constraints. Here, Infineon Technologies develops a fully programmable, scalable multi-processor architecture optimized for video processing, which provides a processing performance similar to actual PCs but at much lower costs, lower power consumption and lower physical size. This architecture supports data-parallelism for low-level image processing, parallelism of tasks in the medium- and high-level as well as control oriented processing. A cycle accurate, virtual prototype of the architecture is available. A library of optimized image processing functions supports a comfortable application development and the reuse of existing application software. Beside the implementation of standard low-level operators new efficient approaches for motion estimation, object detection and tracking are developed and tested in applications for intelligent vehicles and intelligent highway scenarios. The integration of these application specific tasks into the image processing library results in a powerful embedded vision platform for video surveillance systems, which supports a comfortable application development.