4DSP - Three new Altera Cyclone III FPGA based video image and compression boards

First in the series and the most capable is the VID375, a unique image processing platform providing two high-speed video streams for real time JPEG2000 compression. Powered by dual Altera Cyclone III FPGA image processors and two Analog Devices ADV212 hardware devices, the VID375 video image processor promises better image compression to meet the needs of next generation digital video cameras as used in medical, military and other precision imaging applications where improved throughput and high quality are vital.

The VID375 features a dual JPEG2000 hardware compression engine based on the dual ADV212 CODEC devices. The VID375 is suitable for on-the-fly compression prior or after the imaging processing. Low-cost dual Altera Cyclone III devices are closely coupled to fast on-board DRAM memory resources, providing the most efficient hardware compression available for the embedded image signal processing market. With the flexibility of the architecture and the use of an industry standard Camera-Link interface, the VID375 makes possible the lossless compression and high-speed storage of video as used for satellites and UAVs. With two Camera Link inputs the VID375 can also be used for stereoscopic vision on vehicles operating in a rugged environment. Two of these boards on a VME, cPCI or VPX carrier board will provide support for up to four video camera inputs, ideal for 3D applications such as 360 degree situation awareness on combat vehicles.

The VID375 produces a JPEG2000 wavelet-based digital compressed image, superseding the older discrete cosine transform-based JPEG compression method. Up to 140 Mega Pixels per second from two independent cameras can be compressed on the fly from a single VID375 board. It can either encode the video frames prior to or after applying an advanced video/imaging algorithm.

“This flexibility can be used to correct effects such as local brightness or barrel distortion to enhance image quality and filter out elements that may reduce the compression effectiveness,” commented Erik Barhorst, 4DSP’s Senior Hardware Design Engineer and Manager of 4DSP’s Image Processing Center of Excellence.

Douglas Sherrod, Business Development Manager at 4DSP told reporters, JPEG2000 is the preferred compression format for storage of vital digital images, “We see a growing application from our defense industry customer base, where UAVs need high performance and real-time compression and decompression. Remote operators that need to select ‘subjects of interest’, track and display them all in real-time with high resolution images benefit from our experience in delivering such solutions.” Mr. Sherrod was referring to 4DSP’s extensive engineering services where 4DSP provides ‘build-to-spec’ development of specialized image processing VHDL algorithms for their many image processing platforms.


Second in the line up is the VID372 which supports two BASE Camera-Link interfaces. It is suitable for on-the-fly imaging and video processing in the most demanding applications. The VID372 also supports two cameras simultaneously, which is essential for 3D vision applications with high frame rate and resolution.

The VID372 has two Altera Cyclone III FPGA devices with 512 Mbytes (up to 2 Gbytes) of on-board DDR2 memory. The VID372 has a flexible FPGA-Memory architecture which produces a best-in-class product for implementing application specific FPGA IP cores for customers’ proprietary embedded image solutions.



Finally, the VID371 offers a robust communication link for video and imaging systems. The VID371 is the most flexible Camera-Link processing board, offering best performance for machine vision and metrology systems, all at an affordable cost. The applications such as robotic visual inspection systems, statistical pattern recognition, target recognition and tracking system, UAV vision and information processing of a 360 degree situational awareness system and object detection as used in IED detection are a few of the many applications for the VID371.

The VID371 features the Camera-Link Full standardized communication protocol, suitable to implement advanced image processing algorithms for ultra-high bandwidth video. This product supports Infrared (IR) cameras and airborne video surveillance.

All VID300 PMC Series platforms are complimented by 4DSP’s available engineering services program, the VID300 PMC Series are specifically designed to permit customer development of specialized VHDL algorithmic video signal processes to meet a customer’s unique and specifically defined requirements. Details of this service can be found at services.