Digital Signal Processing Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 8.6. Power consumption trend of
today's leading FPGAs.
retaining the programmability required for last-minute specifi-
cation changes and field upgradeability.
Combining exceptional image quality with low power
consumption is the key challenge when designing EOIR systems.
For hand-held and wearable systems, such as night-vision
goggles (NVGs) or weapon sights, the critical specification is often
the number of hours a unit can run on AA batteries.
Low-power FPGAs are the platform of choice for almost all
state-of-the-art EOIR systems because they meet the need for
programmability, real-time video processing performance, and
low power consumption. In practice, each successful generation
of low-power FPGAs have achieved both lower static and
dynamic power consumption by utilizing a combination of
architectural enhancements and lower core voltages. As the
process technology continues to march downwards, the average
power consumed by these FPGAs has been dropping by up to 50%
and 30% (as shown in
Figure 8.6
).
8.4 Conclusion
There are various other sensor processing functions that can
be, and are, applied to image sensor data. Some of these functions
include:
Digital zoom/binning.
Noise filtering.
Non-uniformity correction.
Wide dynamic range processing.
Local-area adaptive contrast enhancement.
