High-speed smart camera with embedded feature extractions and profilometry measurements

Nowadays, high-speed imaging offers high investigation possibilities for a wide variety of applications such as motion study, manufacturing developments. Moreover, due to the electronic progresses, real-time processing can be implemented in the high-speed acquisition systems. Important information can be extracted in real-time from the image and then be used for on-line controls. Therefore we have developed a high-speed smart camera with high-speed CMOS sensor, typically 500 fps with a 1.3 Mega-pixels resolution. Different specific processing have been implemented inside an embedded FPGA according to the high-speed data-flow. The processing are mainly dedicated to feature extraction such as edge detection, or image analysis, and finally markers extraction and profilometry. In any case, the data processing allows to reduce the large data flow (6.55 Gbps) and to propose a transfer on a simple serial output link as USB 2.0. This paper presents the high-speed smart camera and focuses two processing implementations: the marker extraction and the related profilometry measurement. In the marker extraction mode, the center of mass is determined for each marker by a combination of image filtering. Only the position of the center is transferred via the USB 2.0 link. For profilometry measurements, a simplify algorithm has been implemented at low-cost in term of hardware resources. The positions of the markers or the different object's profiles can be determined in real-time at 500 fps with full resolution image. A higher image rate can be reached with a lower resolution (i.e. 500 000 profiles for a single row image).

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