An Embedded Smart Camera on a Scalable Heterogeneous Multi-DSP System

Abstract

A smart camera combines video sensing, high-level video processing and communication within a single embedded device. These devices a core components of novel surveillance systems. This paper reports on a heterogeneous smart camera targeting traffic surveillance. It is comprised of a CMOS image-sensor, several digital-signal processors and a network processor. We present its scalable and reconfigurable two-fold software framework, which enables the dynamic allocation of algorithmic tasks (“applications”) to the DSPs. This framework provides middleware-like service like abstraction of data sources and communication channels. We introduce a resource manager, which manages and keeps track of the DSP’s on-chip resources like memory utilization, direct memory-access (DMA) channels and interrupts. Using the resource manager, applications can be distributed to DSPs with the lowest system load. Experiments with our prototype show the system’s usability using an MPEG-4 encoder and a sophisticated videoanalysis algorithm.