Calsonic Kansei used DK for real-time imaging recognition

Calsonic Kansei Corp. researchers developed a new drive-by-wire automotive system to dramatically reduce traffic accidents and gridlock on crowded freeways. The system was designed with Agility’s C-based synthesis solutions for use in on-board automotive intelligent transportation systems (ITS).

The system captures and identifies a vehicle in real-time with more than double the performance, inherent adaptability and with lower power consumption than similar previous systems. Using license-plate recognition to calculate driving criteria such as distance and position the system allows the driver to maintain a safe distance from a car in front to reduce "tail-gating" and rear-end collisions.

Recognition systems typically rely on sophisticated image processing algorithms running on high-end processors linked to a camera. However the on-board, or in-car, constraints set by the project such as power consumption, heat and space meant a processor -based solution was impractical and due to rapidly changing standards in ITS, custom ASIC was too expensive and inflexible. The end solution was FPGA based with the algorithm parallelization, acceleration and implementation made possible using the Agility DK Design Suite. Connected to a car mounted CCD (charge-coupled device) camera, total processing time that included intensity conversion and color sorting was reduced form 21.56ms to only 10.0ms.

"Applying recognition processing into automobiles requires low to medium volume, low power and rapid design to support the wide variety of chip types needed to meet the characteristics of different cars. To meet these requirements FPGAs are a better choice than ASIC and the DK Design Suite provided a distinct advantage by helping us to quickly design and implement the different design parameters needed by the project."

Mr. Masatoshi Arai, manager, Advanced Engineering Development Group, Calsonic Kansei Corp.