An FPGA-based Smart Camera System

This paper presents an image processing system based on smart camera platform, whose two principle elements are a Pan-Tilt-Zoom (PTZ) camera and a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). The latter is used to control the various sensor parameter configurations and, where desired, to receive and process the images captured by the PTZ Camera. With the advent of today's highly integrated Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) it is possible to have a software programmable processor and hardware computing resources on the same chip. Apart from having sufficient logic blocks on which the hardware is implemented these chips also have an embedded processor with system software to implement the application software around it. In this paper, the Spartan3A DSP based Xilinx VSK platform is used for developing the proposed extensible hardware-software video streaming and processing modules. In order to develop the required hardware and software in an integrated fashion, Xilinx Embedded Development Kit (EDK) design tool has been used. A number of Xilinx provided IPs are customized to realize the hardware modules in the FPGA fabric.