High Performance Front Camera ADAS Applications on TI's TDA3X Platform

Abstract

Advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) are designed to increase driver's situational awareness and road safety by providing essential information, warning and automatic intervention to reduce the possibility/severity of an accident. Of the various types of ADAS modalities available, camera based ADAS are being widely adopted for their usefulness in varied applications, overall reliability and adaptability to new requirements. But camera based ADAS also represents a complex, high-performance, and low-power compute problem, requiring specialized solutions. This paper introduces a high performance front camera ADAS based on a small area, low power System-on-Chip (SoC) solution from Texas Instruments called Texas Instruments Driver Assist 3x (TDA3x). The paper illustrates compute capabilities of the device in implementation of a typical front camera ADAS. The paper also introduces key programming concepts related to heterogeneous programmable compute cores in the SoC and the software framework to use those cores in order to develop the front camera solutions. These aspects will be of interest not only to the ADAS developers but for computer vision and compute intensive embedded system development.