Valde Systems has introduced the first camera designed specifically for outdoor autonomous vehicle operation. Now you don't have to choose between cheap, poor-quality security cameras and expensive, but fragile, machine-vision cameras.
The VS151 combines convenient size, ruggedness, and capability with a price you can afford.
The Valde Systems VS1701 is a breakthrough in stereo image processing systems. Mount it using a standard 1/4-20 camera mount, add a power supply and an Ethernet connection, and you'll have a powerful, flexible, cost-effective and complete stereo vision system. The VS1701 rigidly mounts two 640x480 cameras together along a 12-centimeter baseline in the same enclosure as the stereo vision processor from the VS1501 unit.
The DSP processor in the Valde Systems VS1701 is one of Texas Instruments (TI) new C64x series of high performance Digital Signal Processors (DSPs). Third party tests have shown that when comparing the 500MHz DSP processor with a 2.5GHz Pentium 4 running common signal-processing routines, even at only 500MHz the DSP is comparable to the Pentium 4 and in some tests it's faster. When the 720MHz DSP is used, this speed advantage is only greater.
The VS1702 unit adds an FPGA coprocessor in line between the cameras and the DSP. The FPGA can be used to perform functions like geometric lens distortion correction, epipolar geometry calculations, and disparity map generation. The output video is also routed through the FPGA, where graphic overlay and image resizing can be performed. Each video port has its own dedicated DDR II high-speed SDRAM memory for image storage.
The VS1701 is well suited for many applications. Its compact design and low power consumption make it simple to embed in mobile autonomous robotic applications, and when equipped with ring lights, the VS1701 is equally at home in industrial automation tasks such as inspection or vision-guided robotics. Other applications include facial recognition, surveillance, and stereo photogrammetry.
The VS1701 ships with a library of C driver routines, basic configuration, and test software installed. Development of the application is completed by the customer with the support of Valde Systems software development engineers. The system supports the free TI library of imaging functions, and developers can use Texas Instruments Code Composer Studio Integrated Development Environment (IDE) to develop their applications. Features of the VS1701 include:
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