Semi-Conscious: Hot FPGA Pixels = Surveillance?

It never ends. Has not one seat in the circle of vision research been left vacant for a new approach?

Researchers at the University of Dayton (Dayton, OH, USA) have developed an FPGA-based program that allows surveillance systems to transmit very large, high quality images in near real time. Funded by the US Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL; Wright-Patterson Airforce Base, OH), the program is designed to provide better images faster from imaging systems in surveillance aircraft to personnel on the ground.

…used field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), which allowed creation of a high-performance system that use the compression performance of JPEG 2000 in files that are small enough for rapid transmission. The research team has processed hundreds of hours of live camera data using their new system, which is also being integrated into a prototype commercial system for use in law enforcement applications. As the technology continues to become more affordable, the system could be adapted for other markets, including medical imaging or consumer electronics.

University of Dayton system speeds transmission of airborne surveillance data

Ahhhhh, the benefits of big old vision architectures do trickle down. Come winter we enjoy the heat of FPGAs stuffed with cranky algorithms grinding through pixels to make …. the same pixels  come out the other end.

It’s 2011, at least give us hope.

But the natural pressure on successful solutions is upward, to become more complicated (job security for R&D) and expensive (better margins, fewer troublesome low-end customers for the semicons), until they can no longer solve new problems.

Although the vision of FPGA conquest is growing grander, actual design practice appears to be moving in the opposite direction.

In this vision, capacious but inexpensive FPGAs—armed with soft CPU cores, memory compilers, libraries of peripheral controllers, and pushbutton system-building tools—storm across the embedded-system landscape, displacing older, less flexible technologies. FPGA vendors cite as benefits reduced inventories, hardware that exactly matches system requirements, and freedom from fear over the obsolescence of single-sourced critical parts. Mostly, however, they repeat the traditional FPGA slogan: flexibility.

Beyond this scenario lies an even grander vision: embedded designs as purely software projects. Just write the code, say these advocates; don’t worry about the hardware. Treat peripherals as just code on the other end of function calls. When your code is working, feed it, your performance and power requirements, and a description of the surrounding board into our magic tool chain. Then, just press the button. Our tool will instantiate CPU cores and memories, infer peripheral controllers, and organize your code. Our stuff will even identify code segments that require greater performance, and compile hardware accelerators from them. Naturally, the whole hardware subsystem that results will fit into our FPGA.

Unfortunately, even as the vision of FPGA conquest grows grander, actual design practice appears to be moving in the opposite direction. In EDN’s 2010 “Mind of the Engineer” study, you told us that fewer designs—not more—are using FPGAs.

FPGA vendors still have a strong case to make for a share of the embeddedsystem market outside their networking citadel. That case must rest upon total cost of ownership, not flexibility, processing power, or ease of use.

FPGAs try to get embedded

Yes “cost.”

Innovation comes from below.