The Color Vision Machine (CVM) is a general purpose image processing
board that includes a 24 bit color frame grabber, a 25 MIPS digital
signal processor, a color video display generator, and an ISA bus
interface. The board is capable of simultaneously capturing,
processing, and displaying images.
The core of the board is a 50 MHz Texas Instruments TMS320C31 digital signal processor chip. This processor has a four stage pipeline and multiple data paths. In one 40 ns machine cycle it can simultaneously: fetch an instruction, write a previous value to memory, perform an arithmetic operation, arbitrarily increment two pointers, and perform a read or write. In terms of floating point performance, the chip can simultaneously add and multiply two 32 bit floating point numbers in a single cycle. Input in the CVM board can be either in NTSC or S-video format with optional termination. The Bt812 digitizer can run in black-and-white, or 24 bit RGB mode, has selective gamma-correction, and controls for altering the contrast, brightness, saturation, and hue of the image. The input can also be automatically decimated to give 256x240, 128x120, or 64x60 images. This allows up to 64 color thumbnails to be stored in each VRAM, or over 1 minute of reduced monochrome video with the full memory configuration. 
The Bt858 output video is produced in NTSC format from 24 bit RGB data. Each color channel has its own lookup table which can be used for gamma compensation or thresholding. These tables also allow an 8 bit monochrome image to be displayed in pseudo-color. In addition there are four overlay planes which can be used to display 15 arbitrary colors, or 7 colors an a cursor. The CVM board also has special circuitry for mixing of live and stored video on a pixel-by-pixel basis. This allows regions of images to be cut out and pasted into mostly live video display. The CVM board is made in a standard single-slot ISA bus format and is mapped to five 8 bit I/O addresses on the host PC bus. In addition to the video processing capabilities there are also 2 TTL inputs and 2 outputs. This makes it easy to control external peripherals or synchronization image acquisition. Features:
This hardware was originally developed in 1995 for the VeggieVision project as a replacement for the original DSP and framegrabber boards, but was also used in the SegCam project. |
| Contact: Jon Connell | Last updated: 6/7/02 | ||
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