Framework for High-Performance Video Acquisition and Processing in MTCA.4 Form Factor

Abstract

The presented framework enables capturing video streams from cameras with a Camera Link interface. It is designed for scalable high-reliability industrial and scientific applications. The solution performs data capture, optionally processing it, and delivers it to a host CPU. It consists of an MTCA.4-compliant frame grabber, its firmware, and a set of software components supporting several different cameras. The framework is focused on Xilinx 7-Series field-programmable gate array (FPGA) circuits. These have I/O pins fast enough to deserialize the Camera Link streams without use of any external components. The reference implementation runs on a hardware platform composed of a dual-slot FMC carrier module equipped with a modern Artix-7 FPGA and up to two Camera Link pass-through modules. The video stream is written to the host computer memory by a custom scatter-gather direct memory access (DMA) engine developed at the Department of Microelectronics and Computer Science (DMCS) of Lodz University of Technology. The framework also includes complete software support consisting of a Linux device driver, application programming interface libraries as well as console and graphical user applications. The proposed video acquisition solution is the world's first Camera Link frame grabber for the MTCA.4 architecture. It enables collecting data from the camera using the top performance 80-bit Camera Link interface, offering 6.8 Gb/s of raw image data throughput. The solution was tested with a number of commercially available cameras.