Prototype design of a time-of-flight camera based on Xilinx Zynq7000 SoC platform

Xilinx Zynq-7000 SoC (system-on-chip) is combined with ESPROS epc660 (320×240 pixels) TOF (time-of-flight) imager to construct a practical 3D TOF video camera in this paper. The most important task of Zynq SoC is to offload the image data from the sensor and process data on-line. The programmable logic (PL) in the SoC is designed to fulfill the data offloading, TOF distance and intensity computing, and TOF image median filtering, meanwhile the processing system (PS) of the SoC with a custom Linux operation system is mainly in charge of the camera management and communication with up-level computers. Benefitting from hardware and software optimized co-design, the hardware image processing is running parallel with the data acquisition from the image sensor, the maximum frame rate of the camera is only limited by the data acquisition thread. The camera was practically constructed and the test results show that the distance precision is 1.5 cm and the maximum video frame rate is 34.4 fps. Because the PL section in the SoC has great data processing capacities, more image processing functions can be added in the camera without affecting its real-time performance. Zynq SoC is demonstrated to be a general and flexible high-efficiency platform for the rapid development of 3D TOF cameras, not only for imager performance evaluation, but also for practical camera device construction.