Raspberry Pi for video/image processing

[Luke Weston]

Hi everyone,

Just thinking out loud here... would the Raspberry Pi be promising or useful as a relatively small, cheap platform with suitable memory and processing power to meet the requirements of the Lunar Numbat JPEG2000 / MotionJPEG2000 image/video processing and compression that Lee Begg and others are working on?

Cheers,

  Luke

[Andy Gelme]

hi Luke,

The Raspberry Pi has video decoding support in hardware (plus a binary
blob), but as yet, no video encoding support.

Whilst technically, it should be capable of hardware accelerated video
encoding ... a key goal for the Raspberry Pi Foundation is cost ... and
the licensing cost of adding a video encoder may be something that
delays or prevents such a thing happening. And that is presuming that
the video codec is one suitable for Lunar Numbat's purposes.

The details of the Broadcom SoC are not public (the Raspberry Pi
architect works at Broadcom) and so it'll be difficult for the open
development community to make effective headway on delivering hardware
accelerated video encoding by themselves (any time soon).

There is talk that support for one of the Raspberry Pi's two unsupported
headers (camera and LCD screen) will be happening in the future. It is
conceivable that when a camera is supported, then an appropriate
hardware accelerated video encoder happens at the same time.

Right now, the recommended standard Raspberry Pi Debian distribution
doesn't even have the floating point hardware enabled !

The Raspbian distribution does have floating point hardware enabled, but
comes with some disclaimers about being 100% robust and ready for the
masses.

I'm sure that situation will change quickly.

Something like the Blackfin ... is probably still the better option.

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[Stuart Young]

Another thing of course would be that Rad hardened versions of the RPi
platform simply don't exist.

I know that Rad hardened versions of Blackfin seem to exist (tho I
think they're all quite slow).

That said, if anyone has access to a ~ 750 Mhz PowerPC, then there
would be the possibility to use that to develop something and then
simply later switch to something like the BAE RAD750 (which, FWIW, is
what's in the centre of Curiosity). It of course then brings up things
like development environment, operating system, and other things that
the program would have to co-exist with.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAD750 for details. One issue of course
is that it uses about 10W, so it's not cheap on the power.

However, this really brings up the main issue of what will
WhiteLabelSpace be actually using for hardware on the rover, as really
that is what we should be targeting (including what OS it's using). I
really doubt we'll need to resort to hardware decoding, as I doubt
that any hardware used will have hardware decoding built in. There's
also the question of how the camera images themselves will be acquired
from the hardware, which will determine in what format they'll be
handed to us.

--
Stuart Young (aka Cefiar)

[Stuart Young]

Whoops. Sorry, the RAD750 runs at 200Mhz, and is equivalent to a 200 Mhz PowerPC (same instruction set).

--
Cef