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A Typical Imaging System you could make with HERON products

HUNT ENGINEERING do not supply pre-configured imaging systems, but this is an ideal application for our HERON & HEART products. We have enough experience to understand your needs and have supplied many imaging customers in the past. If you are planning to build an Imaging or Industrial Inspection system we can help you to select a powerful real time architecture and help you to develop the program for your system.

There are many forms of Imaging. All of these systems have the common need to acquire an image, to process it in some way, and to make an output from the system. The type of processing and output will vary from system to system -- for example some systems will output a processed image for a user to view, where others might simply accept or reject a component from a production line.

The image acquisition system can be simple or include complex pre-processing of the data. Although different systems will have different needs they often use common image processing functions to build up the "image processing" algorithm. Some functions can be performed at pixel rate by FPGA modules, but others will require a high level of branching and decision making - better suited to a DSP.   

A HERON system for Imaging will typically use an FPGA based module as a Digital Camera Interface. Most systems will find it useful to have some SDRAM connected to that FPGA as offered by the HERON-FPGA5, HERON-FPGA7, HERON-FPGA9, HERON-FPGA12 and HERON-FPGA14 modules. Standard Intellectual Property (ready prepared programs) for Camera Link™ cameras is available free of charge with your module. Digital cameras are growing more and more popular, but we may introduce other image acquisition modules - RGB analog, Composite Colour etc.

Normally, you will use fixed point processing to process your image so you could choose an FPGA module. If you choose the HERON-FPGA9 or HERON-FPGA12 you could combine the FPGA logic with the embedded fixed point PowerPC processor. If you prefer a DSP you could choose the HERON2 with the fixed point C6203

The modules will be placed onto a HERON module carrier - like the HERON-BASE2 USB 2.0, HEPC9 PCI or HECPCI9 cPCI cards.

It is often an advantage to display images before or after processing, but normally this is only for development purposes. In that case we provide some examples of how to pass the images to the Host PC and display them there. We have an Imaging with FPGA demo and an Imaging with FPGA and C6000 demo as frameworks to start developing your imaging system.

You may also require additional interfaces to control other hardware.
You will also need software tools to allow you to develop software for your FPGA and or DSPs

So a typical system is :-
HERON-BASE2 and HERON-FPGA14.  But your needs might be different - take a look at the full range of  HERON products and if you need some help with choosing your system configuration please use the enquiry form.