Real World Video & Imaging Answers

		For video, imaging, and multimedia systems designers, TI offers DSP and analog solutions to fit your needs. From portable to plugged applications, TI can help accelerate your design with smarter image processing, more functionality and flexibility that differentiates your product in the marketplace. TI solutions include silicon, such as TI's new TMS320DM64x™ digital media processors, TMS320C6000™, TMS320C5000™ and OMAP5910 DSPs. Plus software, developer kits, systems expertise and support are available to accommodate all your needs - no matter what imaging and/or video end-equipment that is being developed.
Answers to popular video and imaging questions can be viewed below. More questions? Ask the video/imaging experts at videoimaginganswers@list.ti.com.

Q1. Why should I consider a Digital Signal Processors (DSP) for video/imaging?

A1. As long as the video/imaging market continues to evolve with multiple emerging video standards (i.e. MPEG4, H.26L, Real Video, Windows Media, etc.) and functionality requirements, you'll need to adapt your designs with the right balance of processing performance, power consumption, and system flexibility. Portable and plugged applications need different levels of support for real time video processing such as video coding, transcoding, transrating, as well as video and imaging instruction sets plus the right power consumption to meet market demands. TI DSPs provide the processing performance and programmability that other processors just can't. For example, the C64x DSP generation can perform simultaneous real time (30 frames/second) MPEG4 encoding and decoding at D1 resolution with high quality. Performance and programmability allows you to future proof designs now to make the challenges of the future simply opportunities to beat your competition to market.

Q2. What solutions are available to get my video/imaging design to market quickly?

A2. TI offers DSP-based solutions for a variety of portable and plugged video and imaging applications, including video surveillance cameras, digital still cameras, digital camcorders, streaming video appliances, video jukeboxes, webpads, wireless cameras, security recording systems, broadcast systems, set-top boxes, personal video recorders, digital TV and server head-ends, just to name a few. And to help you get these designs off the ground quickly, TI offers numerous application development kits, which provide hardware and software at a variety of integration levels and price points to handle real-time performance, channel density and simultaneous processing of video, audio/voice and data streams across both wired and wireless networks. These kits help the developer build designs that provide the integration of various types of digital media streams, real-time delivery to avoid network and system-level bottlenecks, flexibility to upgrade evolving digital media standards in software during system deployment, and reduction of the latency or lat times involved in delivering media content across different endpoints.

Q3. Do you have to be a video/imaging expert to use TI's digital media development kits?

A3. Engineers familiar with video techniques are constantly challenged to leverage the latest programmable DSPs to accelerate designs. Even experienced DSP engineers may not have expertise in the latest algorithms, techniques and video codecs (such as MPEG4, H.264, Real Video and Windows® Media). To simplify development of digital media applications, TI now offers the TMS320DM64x™ Digital Media Developer's Kit (DMDK). Perfect for both novice and expert DSP and video/imaging application developers, it is unlike any other DSP application development toolset. The DMDK comes with a development board based on the 600-MHz TMS320DM642 DSP, video camera, emulator, Code Composer Studio™ Development Tools, code libraries and demo drivers, as well as video application software examples. This comprehensive kit is intended to help both experienced and novice developers get the most out of the DM642 DSP, which has a high level of peripheral integration and a high-performance CPU with eight independent functional units. With this kit providing a comprehensive development platform for video/imaging applications, engineers can create their designs faster than ever before.

Q4. What solutions are available to get my digital video surveillance design to market quickly?

A4. TI offers a variety of DSP-based solutions for digital surveillance cameras used in stores, shopping malls, office buildings, casinos, sports centers and virtually any other networked environment where security is needed.

Numerous hardware/software getting-started kits are available from TI to get these designs off the ground quickly, including the TMS320DM642 Evaluation Module, the TMS320DM64x™ Digital Media Developer's Kit and the Video Security over Internet Protocol (VSIP) solution. The most complete development platform is TI's VSIP. This solution leverages the DM642 digital media processor to provide programmable intelligence for highly differentiated, leading-edge features such as motion detection, object tracking, position mapping, object recognition and event recognition. The VSIP has an easy-to-use, open development environment for rapid time to market, which eases the complex transition from analog to digital. In addition, the solution includes a high-compression ratio for storage of high-resolution images (data).

No matter what video standard you need to execute (e.g., MJPEG, MPEG2, MPEG4, WMV9 or H.264), TI's programmable DSP-based solutions help the developer build designs that provide high-quality DI resolution, optimized functionality and a reduction of lag times involved in delivering media content across different end points.

Q5. Why is compression necessary for video/imaging application development?

A5. A major challenge for digital video is that raw or uncompressed video requires a lot of data to be stored or transmitted. For example, standard definition NTSC video is typically digitized at 720x480 using 4:2:2 YCrCb at 30 frames/second. This requires a data rate of over 165 Mbits/sec. To store one 90-minute video requires over 110 GBytes or approximately 140x the storage capability of a CD ROM.

Lower resolution video such as CIF (352x288 at 30 frames/second), often used in video streaming applications, requires over 36.5 Mbits/s - much more than can be sustained on even broadband networks such as ADSL.

So, it is clear that compression is needed to store or transmit digital video. There are many different compression standards out on the market that can be used for this purpose. To find out more about the compression standards and tools available, check out TI's recent webcast: “Making Sense of the Video Codec Alphabet Soup” which describes each of these codecs in detail.

Please visit www.ti.com/videoimaginganswers for the link to the codec webcast, online training and TI's Digital Media Developer's Kit and other tools, hardware and software available today