A View from Above

Bird’s Eye View is an embedded vision feature currently in high demand for ADAS as it provides a 360o surrounding view of the vehicle, as if seen from above. As a minimum the feature will assist drivers when parking, but it also has the potential to play a role in obstacle detection and for providing lane departure warnings.

The reference design is available with Aldec’s TySOM-3-ZU7EV embedded development kit and requires an FMC-ADAS daughter card and four fisheye cameras; also available from Aldec either separately or as part of Bird’s Eye View bundle.

 “As with all our TySOM reference designs we’ve set out to save software and firmware engineers considerable design time and effort,” comments Radek Nawrot, Director of Operations at Aldec. “This allows them to take a building-block approach for some functions and to concentrate on integration issues and the crafting of higher-level functionality, which is where their skills are best employed and how they bring most value to their projects and companies.”

The Bird’s Eye View reference design makes the most of the Zynq device’s processing system (software) and programmable logic (firmware) parallel processing capabilities, and has six stages. These are: 1 – image capture (firmware), 2 – frame resize (software & firmware), 3 – lens distortion removal (software & firmware), 4 – perspective transformation (software & firmware), 5 – final image creation (firmware) and 6 – output to display and/or other ADAS systems (firmware).

The TySOM-3-ZU7EV features a Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC device, which provides 64-bit processor (dual-core ARM Cortex) scalability while combining real-time control with soft and hard engines for graphics, video, waveform, and packet processing.

Aldec provides a HW/SW co-simulation solution for Zynq-based applications in the form of Riviera-PRO, the company’s popular functional verification tool, when used in conjunction with open-source Quick Emulation (QEMU).