An Embedded High Performance Data Acquisition and Pre-Processing Interface for Asynchronous Event-Based Silicon Retina Data

摘要

In this paper we present an embedded high performance Serial RapidIOTM data acquisition interface for Silicon Retina technology based computer vision applications. The Silicon Retina technology is a new kind of bio-inspired analogue sensor that provides only event-triggered information depending on variations of intensity in a scene. Unaltered parts of a scene without intensity variations need neither be transmitted nor processed. Due to the asynchronous behavior and the varying data-rates up to a peak of 6M events per second (Meps) per channel and a time resolution of 10ns of the imager, a distributed digital signal processing system using both a single-core and a multi-core fixed-point digital signal processor (DSP) is used. The single-core DSP is used for data pre-processing of the compressed data streams and forwarding it to the multi-core DSP, which processes the actual data. Pre-processing also includes disposing the data required for processing on the multi-core system using a data parallelism concept. We discuss both design considerations, and implementation details of the interface and the pre-processing algorithm.