A major step in parallel architecture for Driving Assistance Introduction of the NEC IMAPCAR2 family

摘要

Recently, the driving assistance systems have become really popular and a gap is to be filled to cover the new requirements: increased computation needs, reduced system cost and enhanced programmability of the solution. Indeed, after the massive adoption of vision systems like lane departure warning or high beam assistant, new applications are now the focus of the automotive industry: traffic sign recognition, road mark analysis, object classification (e.g. pedestrian, car). NEC Electronics has already decided in the late 90's to jump into the driving assistance market with the release of the IMAPCAR device which is considered today by many experts as the state of the art of embedded image processing solution. The first car in production using IMAPCAR technology is the Lexus LS 460 in which it was processing stereo-camera images for obstacle detection in a pre-crash safety application and a lane keep assistant function. To fulfill the new requirements, one promising approach is to design a programmable highly parallel processor architecture that can fully exploit various levels of inherent parallelism of an application. However, while conventional SIMD architectures can fulfill the low cost requirement, they present impediments to the exploitation of various levels of parallelism. And while conventional MIMD architectures can exploit various levels of parallelism their hardware cost is usually several times higher than SIMD cost. Combining advantages of both architectures is the goal of the high-end computation units from NEC Corporation: the XC (eXtensible Computing) core. NEC Electronics describes you the continuation of its developments with, first, the presentation of the XC core improved features, a SIMD and MIMD mixed-mode scalable parallel core architecture for embedded systems. Then, the IMAPCAR2 family roadmap will be detailed. This product family intends to provide a complete platform based on the XC core technology to perform from low end to very-high end applications using a fully programmable solution. After that, the presentation will deal with the programming model of this new core and the software compatibility across the family. Finally several applications will be demonstrated on our IMAPCAR processor. On demand, we could demonstrate a lane tracking, an obstacle detection, a traffic sign recognition or a pedestrian recognition in real time. Categories and Subject Descriptors C-Driving assistance C2. E copilot with situation awareness C2A. On-board systems.