Standards
Preparing for an embedded future
Greg Blackman spoke to the EMVA’s Arnaud Darmont about plans to establish a standard for embedded vision products
E
mbedded computing promises to lower the cost of building vision solutions, making imaging ubiquitous across
many areas of society. Whether this turns out to be the case or not remains to be seen, but in the industrial sector the G3 vision group, led by the European Machine Vision Association (EMVA), is preparing for an influx of embedded vision products with a new standard. ‘An embedded vision standard is important
for the future of the machine vision market,’ commented Arnaud Darmont, the EMVA’s standards manager. ‘Right now, there still aren’t many embedded products on the market, but we see this as a trend for the future. We need to start working on the standard now, because when it becomes real, we need this standard to help embedded vision to penetrate the market.’ It’s still early days in the
camera supplier will provide a soſtware design kit based on the standard that is compatible with any soſtware package. In this way, any embedded machine vision soſtware will run on any embedded camera. Te standard will specify soſtware to run
development of the standard, but at an initial meeting at the end of August in Hamburg, Germany, the group identified three aspects that the standard should try to address. Te first part is a soſtware framework, so that
code is compatible across different embedded platforms. Te idea is that an embedded
An embedded vision standard is important for the future of the machine vision market
on top of Sony/JIIA SLVS-EC or MIPI CSI-2 D-PHY physical layers. If the board or sensor uses a separate interface, it will not be part of the framework, according to Darmont, but the group will provide examples and recommendations on how to build a similar framework for a different interface. Te soſtware framework will be based on GenICam: the GenICam SDK will be available for the user to program image processing code and connect to the sensor, and there will be a GenTL interface between the driver and the user. Tis soſtware
framework is well defined, according to Darmont, and there is a working group. Te other two parts, involving hardware, are less well defined and are still being discussed.
40 Imaging and Machine Vision Europe • Yearbook 2018/2019 Te second part concerns connectors and
cables. Image sensors have different pin-outs, with different speeds and different controls: Sony’s SLVS-EC sensor interface, LVDS, and MIPI CSI-2 are three examples. Te proposal is to define compatible board-to- board connectors and ribbon flat cables, so that manufacturers of processing boards can include a connector that matches the sensor boards. Te cables and connectors will be compatible with the voltage levels and speeds provided by the image sensors for the most common interfaces. ‘In the market now, vision systems are
delivered as a camera, with the sensor, the sensor board, the processing board, all coming from the same supplier,’ Darmont explained. ‘Tis [part of the standard] is more for the future, if someone wants to replace the processor or the sensor board in the camera with something else compatible.’ Currently, the standard group has decided
only to recommend interfaces between image sensors and system-on-chips (SoCs) for embedded vision, namely a Sony SLVS-
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