High-Speed Imaging FPGA cover

High-Speed Imaging with FPGA — Reusable Vision Engine

Ingest high-speed camera streams, process edges/keypoints/motion in hardware, and stream compact results via 10GbE/PCIe. Same platform, different pipelines for factory, robotics, and labs.

FPGAVisionHigh-Speed I/ODDR10GbE/PCIe

Purpose

Build a reusable, low-latency FPGA vision engine that ingests high-speed camera streams, buffers safely in DDR, runs modular blocks (edges, corners, motion) in hardware, and outputs reduced results over 10 GbE/PCIe. Different users load different pipelines.

What’s New / Why it Matters

  • Deterministic latency: pixels-in → features-out in microseconds.
  • Bandwidth reduction: stream ROIs/keys/flow, not raw frames.
  • Reusable platform: same hardware, different pipelines.
  • Industry fit: mirrors real work in robotics, vision, and test.

Components & Modules

CategoryPart / NameNotesStatus
FPGA boardZynq-7000 (Zybo/Zed) or ZCU104DDR on-board; PCIe/10G on higher-endto buy
High-speed link10 GbE SFP+ FMC or PCIechoose based on boardto buy
Camera sensorSony Pregius IMX250 / onsemi PYTHONglobal shutter; LVDS/MIPIto buy
Lens & lightingC-mount lens + LED panelconsistent exposureto buy
Sync/triggerPTP/trigger boardtimestamp alignmentto buy
Bench tools12V PSU, scope/LA, tripod/fixtures—to buy

Update the table by editing the components array at the top of this file.

Architecture

  1. Sensor ingest (MIPI/LVDS → AXI)
  2. DDR buffering (no drops; measured margins)
  3. Pluggable vision stage
  4. Reducer (ROIs / keypoints / flow / stats)
  5. 10 GbE/PCIe output; optional PTP timestamps

Vision Toolbox (hardware blocks)

Edges & Gradients

Sobel / Canny for clean outlines

Corners & Keypoints

FAST + ORB descriptors

Motion

Lucas–Kanade (sparse) / dense flow

Reducers

ROIs, keypoints+descriptors, flow vectors

Use-case templates

  • Factory: Canny → blob/shape → stream defect ROIs
  • Robotics: FAST/ORB → LK flow → stream tracks (box + velocity)
  • Lab: threshold/edges → centroid/size → CSV time-series

Roadmap

  1. CSI-2/LVDS bring-up → RAW10/12 unpack → checksum
  2. DDR buffering with stress-gen + checker (no under/over-runs)
  3. Vision v1 (Sobel/FAST) → v2 (ORB/LK flow) with latency/throughput/power
  4. 10 GbE/PCIe streaming + timestamps; host viewer/API
  5. Benchmarks vs CPU/GPU (accuracy, latency, energy/FPS)

References (reputable)

  1. OpenCV Canny
  2. FAST Corner (Rosten & Drummond)
  3. ORB (Rublee et al., 2011)
  4. Lucas–Kanade (CMU notes)
  5. OpenCV Optical Flow
  6. AMD/Xilinx Vitis Vision
  7. AMD/Xilinx MIPI CSI-2 RX (PG232)
  8. IEEE-1588 PTP