Smart camera kit designed for rugged vision systems

6th March 2018

congatec

Lanna Deamer

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congatec has introduced its first MIPI-CSI 2 Smart Camera Kit for vision systems at the edge of the IIoT. It is an application-ready kit for the evaluation and deployment of MIPI-CSI 2 based rugged smart camera analytics in harsh industrial, outdoor, and in-vehicle environments. Developers benefit from an instantly deployable industrial-grade smart MIPI-CSI platform.

Built with commercial, off-the-shelf available components, it simplifies development and accelerates the time to market of smart camera analytics solutions for the edge of the IIoT.

MIPI-CSI 2 based smart camera technology brings video analytics and optional artificial intelligence for decision making to the IIoT edges, saving on data transmission costs, speeding time to results, and ultimately enabling autonomous behaviour.

Typical smart camera applications at the IIoT edge include industrial and medical imaging and vision systems, situational awareness and video surveillance systems in smart cities, as well as intelligent vehicle applications, augmented reality in maintenance, gesture-based controls or biometrics recognition.

"MIPI-CSI 2 cameras are the perfect complement to the hardware-based video acceleration implemented on our Intel Atom processor based Pico-ITX boards," explained Jürgen Jungbauer, Product Line Manager Single Board Computer at congatec.

"As we have enabled a Passthrough mode, the logic of the Intel Atom processor can handle the camera sensor directly, making video processing very flexible, fast and efficient. Having access to all this before OEM demands occur, makes it easy for our customers to explore new technology options."

MIPI-CSI is the most widely used camera interface for consumer-grade mobile devices. Implementing this high speed protocol on embedded boards such as the Pico-ITX motherboard from congatec simplifies the support of high performance applications, including 1080p, 4k, 8k and beyond for rugged industrial-grade 24/7 embedded systems, as the ecosystem for MIPI-CSI is rich and highly elaborate.

The congatec MIPI-CSI 2 Smart Camera Kit includes all the building blocks of a smart camera solution, and can be easily customised to support new applications and features.

It is 100% compliant with the latest MIPI-CSI standard and optimised to run the MIPI-CSI 2 camera from Leopard Imaging based on ON Semiconductor's AR0237 HD sensor together with the rugged conga-PA5 Pico-ITX single board computer based on Intel Atom E3900 processors for the extended temperature ranges. It comes with all required configurations and patches, and is ready to run code on the basis of the Linux Yocto kernel.