Polytech’Clermont-Ferrand, a French Engineering school, ran a university project in partnership with Sundance. The main work was focused on building a standalone embedded system based on the Sundance advanced video system: SMT8039.
This system is able to detect a person or an object in a public area from a video camera input. The application executes a tracking algorithm in real time. The targets are identified by a cross and a rectangular frame. The processing is implemented on the Texas Instruments DM642 DSP and the Xilinx Virtex-4 FX60 FPGA.
The embedded application was designed with the 3L Diamond software to give best performance. The algorithm is split into four DSP software tasks and the frame-grabbing is done in the FPGA firmware:
- Acquire the current image and store it into a buffer,
- Subtract every pixel of the current image from every pixel of the first image (stored at the beginning of the process),
- Compare each result with a threshold to get a black and white image. So the moving objects will be illustrated in black.
- Calculate the barycentre of all the black points, and display the result on a console screen with a cross and a rectangle around the person.
Typical video applications illustrated by this concept are:
- Human and object detection, recognition and identification,
- Person or object counting,
- Traffic monitoring,
- Security and Surveillance IP Cameras…
Polytech’Clermont – CUST, Blaise Pascal University, Clermont-Ferrand, France