DESIGN OF TMS320C40 SIGNAL PROCESSORS AND PROGRAMMABLE LOGIC-BASED PROTOTYPING ENVIRONMENT OF REAL-TIME MACHINE VISION ARCHITECTURES

Performance and flexibility are the two most common requirements from the computer architecture for machine vision applications. These requirements are fulfilled when a heterogeneous system is built using signal processors and programmable logic circuits together with special commercial components. An environment has been designed in which it is possible to evaluate prototypes of architectures for real-time machine vision applications. It contains commercial image acquisition devices, FPGA-circuits based preprocessing unit, TMS320C40 signal processors based image analysis unit and workstation or 486-based knowledge processing unit. The present status of the system is that self-designed preprocessing hardware has been constructed and tested and the performance of image analysis unit has been evaluated.