Camera + DSP = human eye + brain

With the advancement of both camera and processor technologies, it's clear that soon blind human being can have an electronic visual aid close to the performance of eye. With such an aid, in future blind people may even read paper. This technology called visual prosthesis is not immediately available for blind people, but the results of this similar research is making machines to see things like human beings.

Today's line scan cameras and other high definition cameras provide high quality pictures, whose data can be processed by cutting edge DSP to read the finer details of the picture.

Immediate market opportunity for this technology is in automated factories to inspect raw materials and finished good for quality, where a camera-fitted robot-like-machine can inspect visually the input raw material or the final product for some set quality parameters. There is also a sizable market in security and surveillance applications domain.

These machines are reliable than humans but no way matches the human eye in performance. To make the machine-eye to work as close as possible to human-eye is the challenge and opportunity for innovators in this domain.

Machine-vision developers use FPGA extensively for machine-vision embedded system development, where FPGA helps to configure their own processor for image processing. FPGA provides both configurable hardware and software to develop highly secure machine vision systems. The issue with FPGA is high cost and longer development time.

To save the cost and development time, the alternative is to go for standard DSP based systems. Now developers can go for DSP based machine-vision systems, with both TI and Analog Devices providing the devices, hardware and platform with processing and features required exclusively for machine vision.

IntelliVision an expert in image/ video processing, has made its video analytics and intelligence solutions to support Analog Devices Blackfin DSP. IntelliVision's video analytics solutions are used in automated monitoring, surveillance and security solutions to identify and react to suspicious activities without the need for operator intervention.

TI's DaVinci processor family members TMS320DM643x, and TMS320DM647 / TMS320DM648 are the DSPs from TI targeted for machine vision applications.

The machine equivalent of eye + brain throws thousands of opportunities for embedded system developers. Whether for career sake, or business sake, this is the area worth the focus.