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Embedded Vision Products
Product Update
Embedded Vision Products
by Rich Handley
September 2003
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Reliable, rugged and compact systems have been the thrust of the
embedded vision market in 2003-and thanks to miniaturization and
advanced packaging technologies, customers have been delivered
better products. According to Jason Mulliner, Vision Product Manager
at National Instruments (Austin, Texas), embedded vision systems
are typically placed in harsh environments or integrated within
a machine. As such, passive cooling with no moving parts is essential
to maintaining reliability in such environments. The constant
push in the consumer world to deliver high-performance, low-power
processors, of course, has only helped the embedded vision world.
Mulliner defined
embedded vision as encompassing image acquisition, processing
and analysis routines directly on a single processor with some
real-time operating system or kernel. "The operating system,"
he told AI, "must dedicate the maximum amount of resources
to the inspection tasks and not be distracted by interrupts or
other processes that may degrade performance. 
Embedded
systems should be deterministic, meaning the inspection routines
will execute in a fixed amount of time, every time."
One such system,
from Santa Clara, CA-based PFU Systems, Inc. (a Fujitsu company), is the NomadFIRE. This self-contained system board is built for high-speed, real-time image capture in embedded applications. Used for prototyping, the NomadFIRE is intended to reduce time-to-market for medical and industrial imaging, public security, robotics, law enforcement and news-gathering applications. The NomadFire uses Plug-N-Run System-on-Module (SOM) components, while a PCI-104 socket provides user-I/O expansion for complex image capture and processing via off-the-shelf PCI-104 modules.
— Indicate 201 under September 03
