Open Source Digital Camera on Field Programmable Gate Arrays

Abstract

We present an open source digital camera implemented on a field programmable gate array (FPGA). The camera functionality is completely described in VHDL and tested on the DE2-115 educational FPGA board. Some of the current features of the camera include video mode at 30 fps, storage of taken snapshots into SDRAM memories, and grayscale and edge detection filters. The main contributions of this project include 1) the actual system level design of the camera, tested and verified on an actual FPGA chip, and 2) the public release of the entire implementation including source code and documentation. While the proposed camera is far from being able to compete with commercial offerings, it can serve as a framework to test new research ideas related to digital camera systems, image processing, computer vision, etc., as well as an educational platform for advanced digital design with VHDL and FPGAs. As examples of that, we report two spin-off projects developed on top of or starting from the presented digital camera system.