A Compact Real-Time Thermal Imaging System Based on Heterogeneous System-on-Chip

This paper presents a real-time embedded thermal imaging system architecture for compact, energy-efficient, high-quality imaging utilizing heterogeneous system-on-chip (SoC) and uncooled infrared focal plane arrays (IRFPAs). Unlike previous systems that organized separate devices for complex image processing, our system provides integrated image processing support for robust sensor-to-surveillance. The image processing organizes two algorithm stacks: a non-uniformity correction stack to mitigate the distinctive noise vulnerabilities of uncooled IRFPAs, and an image enhancement stack including contrast enhancement and temporal noise filters. We optimized these algorithms for domain-specific factors, including asymmetric multiprocessing (AMP), cache organization, single instruction multiple data (SIMD) instructions, and very long instruction word (VLIW) architectures. The implementation on the TI TDA3x SoC demonstrates that our system can process 640×480, 60 frames per second (FPS) videos at a peak core load of 57.5% while consuming power less than 2.2 W for the entire system, denoting the possibility of processing the 1280×1024, 30 FPS videos from the cutting-edge uncooled IRFPAs. Additionally, our system improves power efficiency by 9.42% and 9.96% at 30 and 60 FPS, respectively, compared to the state-of-the-art when executing similar image processing algorithms.