Grandeye Selects 3DLABS' DMS-02 Media Processor For Its 360° Intelligent IP Surveillance Cameras
London — 3DLABS Semiconductor, a fabless semiconductor company, announced that Grandeye Ltd., the market and technology leader in 360° surveillance cameras for situational awareness, is using the DMS-02 multimedia processor in its latest high-specification Halocam Compact IP camera range. The DMS-02's unique performance capability enables Grandeye to manage all the camera's intensive graphics processing requirements on a single chip. The resulting cost reduction has enabled Grandeye to extend its product's appeal into new markets, with the potential to significantly increase its customer base. By using the DMS-02 Grandeye has also been able to reduce the Halocam Compact's power consumption over the previously announced Halocam Pro analog range by a factor of four. Grandeye launched the new Halocam Compact IP series at IFSEC, May 21-24, 2007.
Halocam is Grandeye's affordable, high-resolution fisheye, wide-angle CCTV camera featuring multiple virtual cameras that provide full 360° panoramic scenes, in addition to separate PTZ views, for wide-angle surveillance monitoring and situation awareness. All image processing is conducted on the camera using the DMS-02 processor. The DMS-02's rich set of standard libraries and full programmability enabled Grandeye to implement all its complex intellectual property rights including 10 patents, 16 applications and 20 patent licences relating to 360° image capture, including; video stitching, perspective projection using 3D computer graphics, intelligent virtual camera generation and dome camera emulation. The Halocam Compact IP series is complementary to Grandeye's award winning Halocam Pro analog range and will help Grandeye to address the growing IP CCTV market.
Dr. Yavuz Ahiska, founder and CEO of Grandeye Ltd., comments: "The DMS-02 chip is enabling our next generation, 5 megapixel Halocam Compact IP range to comfortably handle a highly intensive 12-bit colour graphics pipeline, image de-warping, intelligence extraction, motion tracking, video compression and streaming via a single chip. We have looked at many other chips and I'm not aware of any other processor with the power to handle this requirement. Achieving this level of performance through a single processor has meant we've been able to reduce the final cost to the customer, which will open up exciting opportunities for us to extend the reach of our high-end technology into new industrial and consumer applications including video call centres, CCTV surveillance, intelligent buildings and domestic premises. Low power was another priority and the 3DLABS chip did not disappoint. DMS-02 has reduced power by a factor of 4 compared to the Halocam Pro analogue range."
Dr. Ahiska continues: "It would be impossible to satisfy our processing requirements with a general purpose DSP because they do not carry enough critical I/O memory bandwidth. We've found DMS-02 to be particularly good at efficient cache management, helping us to get the throughput we need. 3DLABS' software development environment and excellent engineering support enabled us to get the best out of the chip. The chip's flexibility allowed us to develop our own proprietary image processing code as well as using standard libraries."
Launched in November 2006, the DMS-02 is based on a multi-core architecture including a fully programmable array of floating-point processors. The pool of processing elements is equally adept at performing video, image, audio, 2D/3D graphics and signal processing tasks.
"The unmatched performance, flexibility and low power consumption of the DMS-02 chip makes it ideally suited to a broad range of media processing applications and markets," said Tim Lewis, sales and marketing director of 3DLABS Semiconductor. "Grandeye has been able to achieve previously unobtainable benefits in video surveillance and image processing as a result of using our technology."
A full suite of hardware and software development tools, CODECs and APIs, including H.264, MP3, AAC, JPEG and OpenGL ES ensure fast time-to-market for OEMs designing next-generation products across a range of fast growing markets, including; portable digital entertainment, portable navigation, video conferencing, automotive infotainment, video surveillance and high-end mobile handsets.
The DMS-02 incorporates 24 floating-point processing elements, dual ARM® 926EJ cores, multi-level caches, three bi-directional video stream ports, 32 or 64-bit mobile memory for up to 1.6 GBytes/s bandwidth and peripheral interfaces to LCDs, CMOS sensors, IDE disks, USB OTG, Flash memory and Audio DACs. The device is OS independent with the first Software Development Kits supporting embedded Linux 2.6.
SOURCE: 3DLABS Semiconductor