Block Diagram (SBD) - Embedded Cameras

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Block Diagram

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Design Considerations

Embedded cameras are used to capture video for embedded applications. Embedded cameras capture images/video from CMOS or CCD sensors, digitize the data and often perform image/video pre-processing algorithms and/or video compression. Video compression is required for data transmission to ensure the interface of choice has sufficient bandwidth. Data transmission is typically either over USB wireless ZigBee to a main system. The base unit consists of an embedded processor with integrated on-chip peripherals and audio/video acceleration to process encoding/decoding.

The core system includes:

Embedded Processor - An Image Signal Processor (ISP) within our embedded processor is used to improve image quality provided from the CMOS or CCD sensors. The ISP typically does pre-processing algorithms such as noise filtering and image stabilization prior to video compression.
Audio Interface (Voice ADC) - Uses an analog-to-digital converter to digitize the audio signals. Microphone arrays are used to improve the audio compression quality by focusing on the incoming sound.
Video Interface - CMOS/CCD sensors come in a variety of offerings. CMOS sensors nowadays come with built-in AFEs (analog front ends) so the output from these modules is already digitized and ready for processing. The popular CCD imagers may or may not include an AFE. Texas Instruments offers many solutions for CCD and CMOS AFEs to suit your needs
Power Management - Power to embedded cameras is typically provided via USB (5 V @ 0.5 A) or 1394 (30 V @ 1.5 A). This power is regulated to usable system voltage rails to power the board. Whether a single-chip power management unit (PMU) or discrete integrated circuits are required, Texas Instruments has them all.