The design of a smart imaging core for automotive and consumer applications: a case study

This paper describes the design of a low-cost, low-power smart imaging core that can be embedded in cameras. The core integrates an ARM 9 processor, a camera interface and two specific hardware blocks for image processing: a smart imaging coprocessor and an enhanced motion estimator. Both coprocessors have been designed using high-level synthesis tools taking the C programming language as a starting point. The resulting RTL code of each coprocessor has been synthesized and verified on an FPGA board. Two automotive and two mobile smart imaging applications are mapped onto the resulting smart imaging core. This mapping process of the original C++ applications onto the smart imaging core is also presented in this paper.