Camera mote with a high-performance parallel processor for real-time frame-based video processing

This paper describes a new smart camera mote with a high performance SIMD (single-instruction multiple-data) processor. Previous versions of our camera mote were equipped with IC3D, a line-based processor. The mote described in this paper is equipped with Xetal-II, a processor designed for frame-based real-time video analysis. The processor uses 320 processing elements in parallel to achieve performance figures of more than 100 GOPS with a power consumption of 600 mWatt at peak performance. The IC has a 10 Mbit internal memory cache to store and work on 4 VGA frames. The internal bandwidth to this memory is more than 1.5 Tbit/s allowing multiple passes over the images within frametime. Augmented with hardware tools for object processing, the new mote opens the door for embedded active vision applications and other iterative techniques such as watershedding and distance transforms in collaborative camera networks.