V4L2 PCIe - Introduction
 | This project is under development. |
Modern systems require each day more complex algorithms, however the execution of these require more complex systems. Some systems such as GPUs allow for acceleration might be prohibiting in terms of power. FPGAs on the other hand allow for faster execution and more power efficient at the cost of a harder development cycle and a harder integration into existing multimedia systems. V4L2 PCIe is project from Ridgerun Engineering which allows for easy integration of FPGA-based systems into multimedia systems such as GStreamer.
General concepts
This project consists of three subsystems which allow for the acceleration of algorithms on custom hardware as shown in the following image:
Frame Sink: which allows the sending of video frames into a PCIe device, this can either be a display or a hardware accelerator such as shown in one shown in the image.
Frame Grabber: allows for the capture of frames from a PCIe device, this device can be either a camera or the result of a hardware accelerator.
HW accelerator: this subsystem allows for the processing of frames by complex algorithms, algorithms implemented in hardware are less power intensive, faster and allow for parallelism.