Video acquisition and memorisation on Excalibur system

The integration of real-time algorithms in the video domain is today a major preoccupation for hardware designers. A number of important technological solutions are possible. This paper presents a SOPC (system on programmable chip) system solution using the development chart of Altera-Excalibur integrated in a NIOS processor. This chart containing programmable component APEX210KE, is interfaced with a camera module for image acquisition and with an image reconstruction module of VGA type. The acquired images are memorised on an external SDRAM module connected to the development chart. The reading and writing on the SDRAM memory are realised by the intermediate DMA (direct memory access) in order to minimise times of access and addressing the memory.