The Tyzx DeepSea G2 Vision System, ATaskable, Embedded Stereo Camera

Our goal is to build vision systems suitable for deployment in devices that operate in demanding dynamic, variably lit, real-world environments. For such systems to be successful, not only must they perform their visual analysis well and robustly, but they must also be small, cheap and consume little power. Further, since volume deployments of such vision systems are still nascent, the systems must be taskable -- flexible enough to support many different uses. We have met our goal with the Tyzx DeepSea G2 Stereo Vision System, an embedded stereo camera consisting of two CMOS imagers, a DeepSea II stereo ASIC, an FPGA, a DSP/Co-processor and a PowerPC running Linux, connected to the Ethernet. It is made practically taskable by the definition of a set of configurable visual primitives supported by specific hardware acceleration. These primitives include stereo correlation, color and depth background modeling, and 2D and 3D quantized representations or projections of the range data. We have defined a common programming interface in which the visual primitives are available both in traditional workstation environments, supported in software, and on the G2 with hardware acceleration. Single G2s are deployed in mobile platforms such as robots and automobiles, while networks of G2s are deployed in tracking systems in public and private sites around the world.