Assignment-1 Submitted byVaibhav Mathur SC08B107 Case study of digital camera and voice recorder system.

First we will talk about digital camera processor. Canon's internally developed all-in-one digital camera processor, the DIGIC chip. The DIGIC chip is a dedicated image processor designed to be very fast, produce improved image quality, faster AF, faster JPEG compression, better battery life and faster continuous shooting. Canon Digic processor

The reason behind developing a in house processor is, that the third party processors arent as fast or developed to perform this very specific job.

Direct communication with: A/D converter (RAW data from CCD/CMOS sensor) DRAM (buffer) LCD monitor Memory Card Camera CPU Provides: Auto focus, Auto exposure, Auto white balance functions Signal processing Imaging control (sharpness / contrast / color)

JPEG compression / decompression Memory card control Display (LCD / video out) Designed to deliver: Improved image quality Improved processing speed Improved AF accuracy Faster continuous shooting Better battery life Low noise Better Auto white balance Better use of buffer (faster processing converts RAW data to JPEG image in buffer) Dedicated design built-in house by Canon for Canon digital cameras Chip specially designed not to introduce noise at the image processing stage Canon philosphy on noise reduction - "Not to erase noise, but not to generate noise"

Another processor of TMS320C54x family is also a good choice. One major advantage of this platform is that, after capturing an image from a charged coupled device (CCD) sensor, processing the raw image, and compressing the image for storage are performed on the DSP. This provides a short shot-to-shot delay and a high degree of flexibility. The system realized also allows instant viewing and selective storing of captured images. This article outlines the various processing stages necessary to take the raw CCD data and produce a JPEG compressed bit stream, and highlights the advantages of DSPs for this application. The programmable nature of this platform allows for the exploration of different image processing and compression techniques. The low-power nature of the DSP provides long battery life.

Digital Camera Memory Devices

There are many different types of memory available for digital cameras. . SmartMedia SmartMedia cards are also known as solid-state floppy discs cards (SSFDC). SmartMedia cards are very small, roughly the size of a matchbook and very thin (45.0 x 37.0 x 0.76mm). They are also very light, weighing in at 2 grams. SmartMedia cards come in two voltages, 3.3V and 5V. The 3V cards have a notch on the right side; the 5V cards have the notch on left side. CompactFlash CompactFlash cards come in two sizes, type I and type II, the type II cards are larger and can contain the IBM microdrive, which holds 340MB. CompactFlash type I cards are also small (43.0 x 36.0 x 3.3mm) roughly the same size as SmartMedia cards only 4 times as thick. CompactFlash cards will operate at both 3.3V and 5V unlike SmartMedia cards. Currently CompactFlash cards can be manufactured in larger sizes (MB) than the SmartMedia cards. IBM Microdrive The IBM Microdrive is a miniature hard drive that comes in a CompactFlash type II format. It can be adapted to fit into a PC card with the PC card device that comes with the drive.

Memory Sticks Memory Sticks are Sony's answer to solid state memory. Sony has incorporated Memory Sticks into many of its new products, including digital cameras, MP3 Walkman's, and other multimedia peripherals that Sony develops. Floppy Disks The standard is a 3.5 inch, 1.44MB floppy disk that fits in a normal disk drive on a PC. The Sony Mavica digital cameras use floppy disks instead of other memory devices. Floppy disks are cheap and do not need a special adapter to transfer the files to your computer, just use the disk drive. The tradeoff for using this cheap alternative is the right time to the disk (definitely slower than solid state storage devices), and the storage capacity. Newer cameras' picture sizes may be well above 500Kb, so that means that you will only be able to fit 2 pictures per disk. That means a lot of disk swapping. SuperDisks The SuperDisks are the same size as normal floppy, but it holds a much larger amount, 120MB in fact. That is over 80 times more than a normal floppy disk. Again one of the downsides is that it takes quite a bit longer to start the camera up and store images than with solid state memory. There are very few SuperDisk digital cameras on the market. Iomega Clik! Disks Clik! disks act like floppy disks but are 40MB in size. Again they are much cheaper than CompactFlash or SmartMedia, but are not included on many cameras, and are slow to store and access pictures. PC Cards PC cards are not available in many consumer level cameras, but they are one of the preferred methods in professional level digital cameras. They can hold very large amounts of information.

CAMIF, also the Camera Interface block is the hardware block that interfaces with different image sensor interfaces and provides a standard output that can be used for subsequent image processing. A typical Camera Interface would support at least a parallel interface although these days many camera interfaces are beginning to support the MIPI CSI interface. The camera interface's parallel interface consists of the following lines :8 to 12 bits parallel data line These are parallel data lines that carry pixel data. The data transmitted on these lines change with every Pixel Clock (PCLK). Horizontal Sync (HSYNC) This is a special signal that goes from the camera sensor or ISP to the camera interface. An HSYNC indicates that one line of the frame is transmitted.

Vertical Sync (VSYNC) This signal is transmitted after the entire frame is transferred. This signal is often a way to indicate that one entire frame is transmitted. Pixel Clock (PCLK) This is the pixel clock and it would change on every pixel.

Example
Let us suppose that a sensor is transmitting a VGA frame 640x480. The video frame is of a format RGB888. Let's assume that we have a camera sensor transmitting 8 Bit's per Pixel clock (PCLK). This means to transfer one pixel of data, 3 PCLK's would be required. The HSYNC would be fired by the sensor after every 640 x 3, 1920 PCLK's. A VSYNC would be fired by the sensor after the entire frame is transmitted i.e. after 1920x480, 921600 PCLK's. The camera interface's hardware block (that could be a part of any SOC) would constantly monitor the above lines to see of the sensor has transmitted anything. A typical camera interface would come with some internal buffering and would also have an associated DMA to transfer the image to the destination memory. The buffer would capture the incoming pixels to temporarily buffer them, and using the DMA the pixels would be transferred (probably line by line) through multiple burst DMA transfers to a destination address in the memory (pre programmed by the camera interface driver programmer). The camera interface's programmer interface might also give a facility of issuing hardware interrupts upon the receipt of the HSYNC, VSYNC signals to the host micro-controller. This could serve as a useful trigger for DMA reprogramming if required.