"Dual stream" surveillance camera design runs Linux

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Mar. 16, 2007

Embedded R&D house eInfochips is offering an IP network camera reference design that runs Linux on a TI DaVinci RISC/DSP processor. The "IPNetCam" targets intelligent IP surveillance cameras, and is claimed to be among the first camera designs to support "dual streaming."

(Click for larger view of IPNetCam)

Differential compression schemes like MPEG-4 produce better video, but many security applications still require motion JPEGs, because higher quality still images can be extracted from them. Still images are preferred for positive subject identification, and are also more desirable for use with automated image analyzers. The eInfochips IPNetCam offers a "dual mode encoding" feature said to be capable of supplying both JPEGs and differential video, streaming one JPEG and two MPEG-4 or H.264 image frames simultaneously. It is among the first cameras in the world to have this feature, eInfochips said.

Nuvation's DaVinci
camera design
(Click for details)

The IPNetCam design is based on TI's TMS320DM6446, one of the first shipping RISC/DSP SoCs (system-on-chip processors) in TI's "DaVinci" line of video-enabled DSPs (digital signal processors) and RISC/DSPs. The TMS320DM6446 weds a C64x+ DSP core, clocked at 594 MHz, with a little-endian ARM926EJ-S core clocked at 297MHz. The TMS320DM6446, incidentally, also powers Nuvation's tiny intelligent camera reference design (pictured at right).

The eInfochips reference design incorporates "ObjectVideo OnBoard," apparently a hardware image analysis coprocessor. The co-processor is said to support rule-based object detection, classification, tracking, and real-time alerting.

I/O on the reference design includes two sensor inputs and two alarm outputs, along with Ethernet. An SD memory card slot allows pre- and post-event recording.

On the software side, the IPNetCam design runs a Linux operating system with a built-in webserver that exposes the user interface. The camera can be configured to compress video in JPEG, MPEG-4, or H.264 formats, or in the "dual mode" format mentioned above. It can stream QCIF, CIF, VGA, or D1 video at 30fps, eInfochips says.

Tapan Joshi, VP of marketing, stated, "The smart IPNetCam reference design will enable new price-performance points in the intelligent surveillance market. The reference design can be easily customized. For OEMs looking for customized design, we will also provide hardware and software customization services reusing IP and building blocks from the reference design."

Brian Eckert, VP of marketing at TI, added, "eInfochips has created a comprehensive, integrated platform that helps companies quickly and easily bring analytics enabled IP cameras to market -- and puts ObjectVideo intelligence into the edge device."

Availability

The eInfochips design appears to be available now. The company also offers a DaVinci prototyping board based on the TMS320DM6446 RISC/DSP chip.

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