High-performance FPGA based camera architecture for range imaging

Range imaging is often used in classification of objects in process industry. The speed of inspection needs to be high, so it does not become the bottleneck in the process. This paper presents an FPGA based architecture for range imaging. Using centre of gravity it calculates the range positions from 2D images. The results show that the proposed architecture can process range values with a performance up to 150 Msamples per second. Thus, using cheep standard technology we can achieve up to 3 times higher performance than expensive state-of-the-art high performance smart-cameras.